Becominga SocialEnterprise

WHITEPAPER AUGUST 2011

Sharing, connecting andSustaining a CollaborativeSocial Culture

“We wanted to enable a knowledgesharing experience to create a socialexperience that drives sharing and theright behaviors to streamline informationmanagement.”

Chaitra Vedullapalli, Sr. Director, Microsoft Field Operations.

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WHITEPAPER AUGUST 2011 peoplesimple

effective

“What I do, I do for collaboration, sharing andpartnerships. This is an essential shift in thinkingthat is required to embrace the social enterprise”

Our outcome has been a major consolidation hundreds of separatedestinations, reduction in complexity by focusing current, field readycontent in one place. The field to focus on their core job since theyno longer needed to hunt through dozens of sites or spend hourspreparing for customer visits.

This paper shares our best practices and tips on making it work withinMicrosoft or any another enterprise organization looking to turn social.

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The key ingredients to a social enterprise are well beyond socialtechnology tools. Enterprises that are becoming socially enabled arequickly learning that engaged people, simple processes and effectivetechnology play an increasingly important role.

First, what does a social enterprise looks like?

An effective social enterprise benefits the enterprise by evolving itselforganically to become a relevant, connected and involved 2-wayinteraction 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 fieldsellers. Our 10-year-old legacy system had reached its limits whichgave us an opportunity to make Microsoft a social enterprise and makeour sellers more productive and more efficiently realize revenue throughshared knowledge.

The social enterprise includes several capabilities:

• Generating content: Employees with subject expertise publish content using a process and technologies to collaborate; discuss andnetwork with each other.

• Organizing content: Employees need a robust enterprise content management system with right surfacing experience such as search,navigation to increase discoverability.

• Contributing content: Employees need to see a priority in stories to acquire and understand knowledge easily.

• Sharing Content: Employees need social capabilities such as Like, Comment with each other.

• Measuring impact: Quantifying elements of the business receive the most positive results.

It took over a year to make this transformation which impacts a largeproportion of our employees and, nearly 10,000 people were involvedin 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 the20 core team members who led the effort. It is hoped that this insightcan be shared within and outside of Microsoft as enterprises aroundthe world take the same path.

WHITEPAPER AUGUST 2011 sharing

buy-in

Key Ingredients

1. Empowering people: Skilling Change Leaders& empowering individuals to enable the changeand generate support for their organization tomobilize around their new experience.

2. Simple Processes: Inventory analysis; cleansingcontent; developing topic ownerships, onboardinga division and communicating effectively

3. Culture of Sharing & Simplification: Developing a mindset for sharing and consolidating the

enterprise digital experience.

4. Effective Technology: Enabling technologies& processes to maintain content.

5. Impact & Measurement: Is the social working?

What the Future Holds

For us, the platform has been popular and growingso our plan to sustain includes:

• Fully optimized mobile experience• Sustain usage• Encourage adoption• Promote publishers and SMEs

1: Empowering People

If the effort is a bottom-up effort (as ours was), thengetting the right leaders in charge and influencerswho have information that requires significantdiscussion and who would benefit the most. Achecklist for this might look like this:

1. Identify initial stakeholders: Where are we entering new markets or promoting new technologies? For example, Microsoft Lync as anew product and topic area, was an ever-evolvingtechnology that required discussion, involvementand frequent updates – a perfect candidate for a topic to be part of the early stages of the enterprise social.

2. Share a collaborative vision & metrics: The vision must include a “place” for everyone involvedto feel that they are represented within the vision.

3. Gain executive buy-in when appropriate: There is a positive turning point in the team whenthe constituent leadership. The core team buildsenabling metrics and content to help each constituent earn the buy-in from their executiveteam.

4. Provide role clarity: The roles often self-emergein a social project. The types of leaders you define will typically have a specific subject expertise and in our experience, they volunteer

If the effort is top-down then the leader of the effortshould not more than lip service experience in livingsocial media and fully embracing the openness,flexible and organic nature of such an effort.

In your own organization, you should look forindividuals with a progressive vision and the abilityto generate thought-leading content. They will beyour leaders for influence, advocacy and collaboration. They are essential for establishing the team’s credibilitywithin the company. The individuals on our teamhad a multi-faceted skill set that included an industry(vs. purely corporate) view. These individuals couldsee the big picture and possessed a unique collaborativementality and their aggregate talent included topicalexpertise that would help us develop rich andmeaningful content. Being socially proactive them-selves, they were also able to reach out to their ownpersonal network and act as a catalyst for the change.

Once we had the right people, we started with apitch deck for our key representatives from segmentsincluding marketing, enterprise sales, OEM,competitive, fastest-moving technologies and areaswhere information was evolving quickly. We theninvited them to a Workshop and titled theparticipants as “Change Leaders” and our goal wasto make them successful and recognized for theircontribution to the company and to justify theirresources.

Then, together, we built a unified vision.3

WHITEPAPER AUGUST 2011 changing

mindset

“Greater than Yourself” by Steve Farber.

Our experience was that it only takes one or twooutliers to block the collective focus on others. Theentire team must buy into this mentality.

The Learning-to-share paradigm is a shift for manyenterprises where employee evaluations put peersin a “me” mentality of making themselves look good. Not to imply that employees are selfish but thisbehavior is often driven by factors such as leadershipexamples, cultural expectation and compensations.

The enterprise social effort at Microsoft took placesimultaneously with another major initiative aroundsimplification. “We all found special challenges insimplification of complex messages and processes”,said one stakeholder. “We have more work to do inthis area.”

Understanding the target for your social platformis also essential. In our case, we identified Microsoftfield sellers, marketers, service delivery and countryleaders as the key target to benefit from our socialsolution. Discussions and surveys started our questas we learned the key pain points for our field whichincluded this poignant remark:

Simplification came about in a massive scale atMicrosoft due to a decade of ad-hoc and randomizedcontent sources. Our social effort dramaticallysimplified the experience for our field which included:

• 5 navigations became 1 navigation in order to reduce time spent to find relevant information

• Migrated 5,452 pieces of content• Simplified 19 top field-facing brand sites• Simplified 2 search engines into 1 search engine• Consolidated 1,600 unmanaged vendors to 49

InfoPedia vendors• Consolidated over 6,000 unmanaged tags one

tagging set on InfoPedia• Each organization such as SMSP, DPE has realized

a 40-70% content and site consolidation

“InfoWeb (legacy system) is thefirst place I look for informationand the last place I find it”.

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2: Simple Processes

At each stage, the team worked on the same step:

1. Inventory analysis: There was a major undertakingto review and catalogue what content to keep, archive and delete and each group defined theirown criteria for how they organized into these categories.

2. Content cleansing: Assign content managementand development owners

3. Topic and owner development: To watch over content areas, a topic owner was defined for a topic page that contained the priority content and chief landing page for a particular topic.

4. Onboarding a division: Ensuring that divisional leadership was supportive. Since this was not a top-down effort, each change leader needed togain buy-in from their organization.

5. Communicating: Together, we developed core messages and synchronized timing and then eachgroup would personalize and deliver what was most relevant to their organization.

Ample notification time is needed to ensure that anyparticular stakeholder has the opportunity to planahead for adoption of a consolidated.

3: Changing culture: Developeinga Mindset for Shaping & Simplification

Learning to share is something we might havethought we mastered in kindergarten, but forenterprises taking on social enablement, there aresome formed habits that must be replaced with newframes of mind, primarily the notion of

“making others successful”.Additionally, there must be an understanding thatthe main point of the effort is to make others greatso the effort can be greater than yourself, a keyconcept in...

WHITEPAPER AUGUST 2011 rhythm

realworld

4: Effective TechnologiesThere are mountains of social tools available for the enterprise but theessential criteria for the technologies utilized in our project were:

• Showcase our own technologies in SharePoint and FAST Search• 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. Policiesand processes around social enablement must be as clearly valuableas 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 viewedthem as policies for better user experience.

Governance around content management in InfoPedia ensures thatinformation is tagged, prioritized, connected and relevant for the longterm sustainability of this simpler experience. The engagement involveddesign reviews, accountability assignments, standards and policies, andof course, good communication.

Governance also includes policies that can capture outliers that canrisk the overall user experience. In this case, once the majority ofadopters are in place with carrots, the “stragglers” can be adopted withthe stick. Here is a sample of our policy that was introduced after thefirst wave of adopters were secured and we demonstrated success withour audience:

Infoweb site owners have been aware of the InfoWeb Platform Retirementfor well over a 2 years now and have had adequate notice to act ontheir transition off of the platform. Transition help and guidance havebeen provided and therefore, Infoweb Site Owners should be equippedand prepared to successfully decommission their sites by the targetdecommission date that they have provided. A new policy is beingimplemented to ensure all sites are successfully decommissioned ascommitted before June 15th and recover costs of managing decommissionchanges and escalations.

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Rhythm of business is the recurring routine of business planning andexecution that every company has in place formally or informally. Tomake our social platform more relevant, we enabled a built-in connectionto the business

Communication was an essential element that involved and informedstakeholders on a routine basis. Weekly check-ins and sequencedcommunications ensured that top-level communications rolled properlyinto the right organizations but were orchestrated from a central sourceto turn confusion into clarity:

We developed a routine course of targeted communication packaging,targeted rhythm of the business, targeted messages and reviews forgreatest impact of our marketing mobilization. Enabling the real-world social in the enterprise means getting specificon what your employees (socially adept or not) can plug in. Here aresome of those areas:

WHITEPAPER AUGUST 2011 ideas

exchange

Improve Collaboration

Private groups – We use discussion groups. We create private groups and invite individuals into a group discussion. This is goodfor internal teams working on similar projects.

Amplify Communication

Blogging – We use blogs for sharing news, tips and resources. Wefocus our blogs with a clear purpose; allow commenting for employeeto share their voice. This is implemented witha right editorial processand privacy rules to protect employees with any severe consequencesto raise their voice.

Microblogging – We use micro blogging for broadcasting, publicQ&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 platformis 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 technologyto understand behavior and insights via blogs, distribution lists andfeeds. This is like a research on employee conversations inside a company. It will work provided employees share their voice in public.

Predictive Markets – I remember it was implemented however don’t have any bias around this technology. What I know is that this required a heavy process to make it effective.

Sharing ideas and knowledge

Knowledge Sharing-We have a knowledge sharing experience forsharing content easily all in one place. I would say it is the best wikistyle topic sharing on sales and marketing content I have encounteredwhich 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.

Trip-and-Fall Alert!Because each member of the team can feel like this projectis “their own” – many group members may communicateindependently to their set of constituents which may leadto lack of consistency. Keep circling the wagons aroundyour core change leaders to ensure that they can leverageyour base message.

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5: Impact & Measurement:Is social working for your company?

Most enterprises are driven by scorecards to know where a projectstarts and where it finishes. The key challenge with a collaborativeproject such as a social platform is how to share in the managementcost.

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 apoint person (PM) to collect all the requirements from various sources(team members, customers and management). Management of demandlist helps to create roadmaps and ongoing improvement plans.

Investment Allocation: This is a juggling act. Investment in newcapabilities versus sustaining the experience is a delicate balance. Ifocus on allocating in capabilities that help my customers achieve theirgoals.

Resource Allocation: Self Service is everyone’s business in theorganization. Clearly defining roles and responsibilities will help inreducing chaos and confusion. At the end of the day customers loseif the resources are not available at the time of need.Listen and Respond: Ask these questions: Am I listening to mycustomer? What am I doing with the information? Active listening iskey to the success of Self Service. Without a listen and respond planall the effort becomes ineffective.

For InfoPedia, our growth rates have been a satisfying hockey stick-shaped adoption rate.

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