implementing a corporate weblog for sap by justus bross
DESCRIPTION
After web 2.0 technologies experienced a phenomenal expansion and high acceptances among private users, considerations are now intensified to assess whether they can be equally applicable, beneficially employed and meaningfully implemented in an entrepreneurial context. It could be observed that companies with geographically dispersed sites and markets employ social software more intensely than those with a single national headquarter. The particular choice of the platform or technology to be implemented is however strongly dependent on its future business case and field of deployment and should therefore be carefully considered beforehand as the following paper strongly suggests. Thefast-paced rise of social software like weblogs or wikis and the resulting new form of communication via the Internet is however observed ambiguously in the corporate environment. The traditional form of a controllable mass medial and uni-directional communication is increasingly replaced by a highly participative and bi-directional communication in the virtual world, which proves to be essentially harder to direct or control. For a considerable share of companies this turns out to be hard to tolerate.The use-case of a highly configured standard version of an open source multi-user weblog system forSAP – the market- and technology-leader in enterprise software – will form the basis for the presentation outlined here. SAP requested the Hasso-Plattner-Institute (HPI) to realize such a weblog to support its global internal communications activities. In the current economic environment and with the changes in the SAP leadership, an open and direct exchange between employees and executive board was perceived as being critical to provide utmost transparency into the decisions taken and guidance for theway forward. Recent discussions about fundamental and structural changes within SAP have clearly shown that need for direct interaction. SAP and HPI therefore agreed to share research, implementation and configuration investments necessary for this project – hereafter referred to as “Point of View”. The platform went online in June 2009, and is at this moment beginning to gain first acceptance among all SAP employees worldwide.TRANSCRIPT
Implementing a corporate weblog for SAP
Presented by
Justus Broß
Paper written by
J. Broß, M. Quasthoff, J. Zimmermann, S. Mac Niven and C. Meinel
presented at BlogTalk’09 | Jeju, Korea | September 16th
"Implementing a corporate weblog for SAP" presented by Justus Bross (HPI) at BlogTalk'09, Korea
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The next 20 minutes...
1. Introduction: Social software & weblogs
2. Corporate weblogs – capabilities and challenges□ Forms of deployment□ Success factors, risks and best-practice
3. Case study: Point of View□ Scope, motivation and vision□ Configuration of the standardized□ Design issues□ Fact sheet
4. Suggestions for further research
5. Conclusion
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"Implementing a corporate weblog for SAP" presented by Justus Bross (HPI) at BlogTalk'09, Korea
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Social Software & Weblogs
■ Weblogs belong to the group of “social software”: simple, easy-to-use and flexible applications that not just enable but facilitate cooperative gathering of content
■ Consent among all existing social software tools next to weblogs (e.g. Instant Messaging, Wikis, Forums or multimedia-sharing-platforms) is that the surplus value is generated out of collaborative (social) activity.
■ Social software therefore enables affiliation to (social) networks as well as structuring and channeling of attention towards a certain field of interest.
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"Implementing a corporate weblog for SAP" presented by Justus Bross (HPI) at BlogTalk'09, Korea
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Numerous areas of application
■ Individual weblogs (diaries)
■ Educational blogs
■ Political blogs
■ More …
■ Corporate blogs:
□ CEO blog
□ PR blog
□ Internal communications tool
□ Crisis blog
□ Branding blogs
□ …
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"Implementing a corporate weblog for SAP" presented by Justus Bross (HPI) at BlogTalk'09, Korea
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Hype Cycle (2009)for Emerging Technologies
Sou
rce:
Gart
ner
(Ju
ly 2
00
9)
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"Implementing a corporate weblog for SAP" presented by Justus Bross (HPI) at BlogTalk'09, Korea
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Corporate weblog success factors
■ Know what you doing, be honest, be prepared, understand the medium (Long-term monitoring, test & try, media-conformity, back-up and emergency plan)
■ Involvement, topicality, institutional backup, good resource planning (Moderation, content-generation)
■ Fitting company values and culture => blogging policies ( IBM Blogging Policy, Sun Policy on public discourses, Weblogs at Harvard: Terms of use)
■ Who, why and for what or to whom? What are the objectives, goals, milestones, target-group, etc.?
■ Overall fit=> social software strategies
■ Technology: security, scalability, etc.
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"Implementing a corporate weblog for SAP" presented by Justus Bross (HPI) at BlogTalk'09, Korea
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What’s wrong here?
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"Implementing a corporate weblog for SAP" presented by Justus Bross (HPI) at BlogTalk'09, Korea
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Deployment possibilitiesfor corporate weblogs
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Sou
rces: Z
erfa
ß (2
00
5), D
B R
ese
arch
"Implementing a corporate weblog for SAP" presented by Justus Bross (HPI) at BlogTalk'09, Korea
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Best practice examples
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■ IBM’s “Innovations Jam” (Collaborations blog)
■ “Frostablog” (Product blog)
■ “Openblog” (CEO blog by Xing), similar to ones of:
■ Sun
■ Intel
■ Adobe
■ GM “Fastlane” … and thousands more…
■ Daimler blog (Customer relationship blog)
"Implementing a corporate weblog for SAP" presented by Justus Bross (HPI) at BlogTalk'09, Korea
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Scope, motivation and vision for SAP blog “Point of view”
■ Especially in a time of crisis, generating open dialogue is paramount to managing fear and wild speculation
■ Triggers that had generated an atmosphere of uncertainty:
□ The transition of a new CEO
□ the global economic and financial crisis
□ the first lay-offs in the history of the company
■ “Point of View” shall be
□ the first step toward ubiquitous dialogue throughout the company
□ an approach to facilitating open, transparent dialogue is arguably the single most pivotal enabler of internal cultural transformation at SAP.
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"Implementing a corporate weblog for SAP" presented by Justus Bross (HPI) at BlogTalk'09, Korea
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Deployment
Point of View
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"Implementing a corporate weblog for SAP" presented by Justus Bross (HPI) at BlogTalk'09, Korea
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Basic requirements
■ Basic (and requested) blogging functionalities have already been provided by WordPress MU:
□ Ready-to-use, open-source (cheap) and easy to handle CMS
□ Post & comment authoring and moderation
□ Permission and role management
□ Handling of multimedia files within postings
□ Generation of permanent URI (so-called permalinks) for posts and comments
□ Generation of separate statistics for readers and moderators.
□ Bi-lingual support (WPMU)
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"Implementing a corporate weblog for SAP" presented by Justus Bross (HPI) at BlogTalk'09, Korea
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Configuration of the standardized
■ benefit of using a popular blog-system like WordPress MU is that some customization requirements can be achieved by using systems-extensions such as freely available plug-ins or add-ons.
■ A considerable part of the system and its extensions needed to be configured and adapted to fit SAPs functionality-requirements:
□ Display nested ("threaded") view of comments
□ Highlighting selected comments, e.g. in a dedicated area of the Web site
□ Anonymous voting and ranking (requirement by work council)
□ Enhanced search and browsing functionality for postings, comments, and tag keywords – including portal search
□ Authentication issues (SSO, HTTPS, LDAP)
□ Design issues – fitting Ci/CD requirements of SAP, browser compatibilities, barrier-free-programming, etc.
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"Implementing a corporate weblog for SAP" presented by Justus Bross (HPI) at BlogTalk'09, Korea
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Case study: „Point of View“
Single-Sign-On (SSO)
Anonymous rating
functionality
Barrier-free-programming
Bilingual (MU)
Commenting order: Wok council first, employees, „highlighted comments“
Design Issues (CI/CD):
e.g. Browser compatibility
„Highlighted comments“: moderation (back-end)
highly customized
SAP-portal integration
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"Implementing a corporate weblog for SAP" presented by Justus Bross (HPI) at BlogTalk'09, Korea
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■ Initially, participation was slow, and employees waited to see how the channel developed.
■ Following critical statements, people felt encouraged to participate.
■ Platform has begun to take on a life of its own with 128 comments for 1st post alone, even 2 months after it was posted.
■ Around 19,000 employees have visited the platform, and it has clocked up 55000 page views.
■ This far exceeds the initial expectations and shows the need for feedback was indeed very present.
■ An increase in access to the blog via tags has also been identified, a trend expected to grow as more content becomes available.
Fact sheet
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"Implementing a corporate weblog for SAP" presented by Justus Bross (HPI) at BlogTalk'09, Korea
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Research suggestions
■ Https-support of Wordpress (e.g. embedment of external video
players, authentication issues)
■ Standardized option (plugin) for linking corporate authentication
system to Wordpress backend.
■ Language issues (switching, some plugins only in one language)
■ MU vs. SU: Most plugins are developed only focussing on SU.
WPMU is constantly behind.
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Contact us
Justus Bross, MSc. Int. Business & MBEScientific Assistant & Doctoral Candidate
Hasso-Plattner-Institut | IT Systems Engineering University of PotsdamCampus Griebnitzsee
14482 Potsdam, GermanyTel: +49 (0)331 5509-524Fax: +49 (0)331 5509-325Email: [email protected] Web: www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de
"Implementing a corporate weblog for SAP" presented by Justus Bross (HPI) at BlogTalk'09, Korea In
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The End
"Implementing a corporate weblog for SAP" presented by Justus Bross (HPI) at BlogTalk'09, Korea
Thank You