No surprise, we frequently get asked for case studies at Jive. In fact, the entire industry has a lack of compelling case studies for social productivity software (a.k.a "Enterprise 2.0″). But we've been able to point to something even better. Chuck Hollis, VP Technology Alliances at EMC, has dedicated an entire blog to his search, discovery, and deployment of an enterprise-wide social productivity solution. He's amazingly transparent he about his own personal obstacles, EMC's cultural challenges and even issues he's had with our software and pricing. Our other customers enjoy reading his blog, too. They've mentioned it a few times at our customer dinners. On a minor note, I'd still argue with the term he uses for it all ("Social Media") but he knows that. And he's even realized over time that the "social" part of the name is true but that inside the enterprise it's not about media, it's about productivity.
I've picked through his posts to-date and organized the major points, below. These are in his own words and I've included links back to the relevant posts. After combing through all of it, I have to say that this is hands down my favorite Chuck quote:
There is no viable alternative in the marketplace to Clearspace from Jive Software. The more we progress, the more sure we are of this statement.
Background: EMC's situation
- Joe Tucci and the exec management sent a clear message - "ONE EMC"
- At EMC, everything was on a need-to-know basis. Our behavior was reinforcing, because once were were "in the loop", you didn't want to buck the system that had given you privileged access to information.
- 30 years of experience didn't always help me. Yes, I was pretty good at spotting problems, but my initial cut at answers came straight out of a 1990's-era textbook.
- Any company that has 35,000+ employees is going to be working on different aspects of "The Problem" - and they're going to need to work with others that aren't in their group
- Business challenges aren't at the product/BU level - it's getting people to work together cross-functionally.
- We want people to get comfortable having open discussions about real problems and collaborative outcomes - that's the behavior. And it won't happen in a walled garden.
- Thousands of eRooms sprung up everywhere, each with its own little puddle of content. These were just repositories that turned into a document dumping ground.
- Knew that this was about "Individual 2.0," framing the business value, and that he'd need to get IT on board.
- We maybe have 5-10 groups that are poking on various aspects of social media. Our HR guys are passionate. Our CTO function cares a lot. The guys who build the Documentum product have a vested interest. A few marketing thingies. A customer support forum. A developer forum. And, of course, a whole bunch of bootleg projects that are either up, or want to be up.
- I'm looking at this as a business strategy for EMC - what investments can we make to ensure we can use this proficiently as a business tool? You don't want to be the last one on the block who "gets it." Definitely not cool.
Selling senior management
- There's really two components to selling senior management. One is creating the case. And the other is finding someone you trust to go fix the problem.
- There's a certain rhythm and pace to these things. Not every problem can be addressed immediately.
- Look, no one looks at that pie-chart, spreadsheet, business-model stuff up front. They get hooked on an idea, and the data supports the idea, and not the other way around.
- My Key Visceral Point: Any company that masters social media - and the powerful use of communities - will enjoy an order-of-magnitude business model advantage over those that don't.
- Imagine if EMC was still using paper, typewriters and the postal service in a era where everyone used email, word-processing and the internet. We'd be at a competitive disadvantage, wouldn't we?
- I put it in the same frame as learning to use the internet. Or outsourcing/offshoring. Or giving laptops to your user. Or providing health-care benefits to your employees.
The search
- During the course of my explorations, I would run into wild-eyed people, intoxicated by this whole social media thing. They appeared to be hallucinating in public and had absolutely no consistency, or even a common lexicon.
- I didn't find anyone who had a practical roadmap for how a company might think about getting from Point A to Point B in a logical, sane series of steps.
- No one of any size or scale (other than small startups) had seemed to grasp the concept of using social media as an overall business strategy.
- There weren't a lot of shining end-to-end examples to go look at, because nobody had really done it yet. Especially at old, fusty, brick-and-mortar companies.
- Realization that there are two product approaches: Document-centric or conversation-centric. I think Microsoft's SharePoint is very document-centric, as an example.
The requirements
- First phase to tackle is behind-the-firewall proficiency. The thinking is that we get good at the skills and behaviors needed for social media proficiency (blogging, communities, tagging, etc.) and then venture outside the firewall once we have thousands of people who are comfortable in this world.
- We weren't interested in Lotus, or Sharepoint, or even EMC's eRoom and Documentum products.
- We wanted something that was just about as transparent as possible, so we could focus on using the tool, rather than the tool itself.
- There was a thought to extend the Microsoft environment we already had: use Sharepoint and all the related technologies to build what we needed. That option was quickly eliminated for two reasons: we'd need to upgrade vast amounts of EMC's infrastructure (servers AND desktops), and it wouldn't give us a slick mobile option, which we wanted. If we started today, we'd having something in 2009. (Note, this post is from 2007)
- Another thought was to go hosted: find something nice and build it outside the firewall. Didn't like that one as well. We wanted to be able to look mgmt straight in the eye and say "the platform is safe." I also wanted our IT guys to engage as well - hosting makes it a bit too easy for them.
- All of the bootleg projects were built around "what was easy" as opposed to "what was right." The fact that something was cheap or free (think open source) was their prime motivator. We wanted a commercial product that had a vendor behind it.
- The real goal is to teach people how to use the tool, and not the tool itself.
The choice
- We found great toolsets that would allow you to build anything. We weren't in a building mood; we wanted to set something up and get going. Out-of-the-box functionality was key to us, the sooner the better.
- Jive's site lets you do two cool things. One thing is to get on their sandbox, register as a user, and fool around a bit: create docs, leave messages, etc. Great way to evaluate the user experience. You can go back whenever you have a few moments, and poke around.
- Jive will let you do a quick registration, and download a fully-featured version of their product (up to 5 users) that runs self-contained on your desktop PC. Cool.
- After we were into the process a bit, we all downloaded the full version of Clearspace onto our laptops, and got to play with *all* the knobs and buttons.
- One of the deciding factors for me was their online support forums. They were active and had good participation. That's nice.
- I really liked the simplicity of the design and architecture. I have a (dated) background in software design, and I really liked the elegance and simplicity of the model. Nothing like a hands-on experience to get you comfortable with something.
- If I had to sum up why we chose Clearspace from Jive Software, it has to be the user experience. No one had a better one.
The risk-adverse naysayers
- A risk adverse person wants to know that you understand their perspective and concerns, nothing more.
- Easier to get this sort of thing out of the way early on, rather than have someone crashing into the party at the very end with a long list of concerns, some of which might be very valid.
- There are certain people that self-identify as risk-identifiers and risk-mitigators. They can be annoying, but they play a valuable role.
- Include risk identification and risk mitigation into my discussions. Make it part of the overall thinking. Encourage participation and discussion of the pros and cons of various risks.
- You can look at all the discussion and dissent in one of two ways: as a pain in the patootie, or as a signpost that you're on to something big.
The initial rollout
- There was fast learning on deployment, processes, resources and some taxonomy debates on how to set things up. EMC also had to deal with pirates.
- We announced availability virally - we all pushed email announcements to people we knew who were interested in what we were doing. We wanted people to "find" us, and not have some sort of official corporate announcement. That, and we wanted to ramp slowly with people who might be more inclined to be patient with us.
- Within the first week, we saw people on the platform that none of us knew. Yes, they were EMC employees, but they weren't who we expected to join in initially. This lead to a lot of thinking on how to orient new users and how to deal with certain policies.
- At the heart of it, everyone wants to be relevant. No one strives to be irrelevant. It's a basic human behavior that also applies to IT people. As an example, our security guys came up with some pretty imaginative scenarios of potential security problems. There was a call to put on profanity filtering and be able to "ban" users. Now, remember, these are the same people we work with day-to-day - all of our users are EMC employees.
- People are finding each other in unique and non-intuitive ways. The platform is connecting people and ideas in ways that we could only hope for. Everybody is commenting on everything. It's gone viral.
- I can now start pointing to real, tangible and valuable intellectual capital that was created through interactions, that was not deterministic in nature.
Challenges and lessons learned.
- EMC has ran into many tactical and strategic challenges.
- Debate on how to treat the approach. Controlled environment and rollout? Or an experiment in emergent behaviors? Peoplw who wanted control were in the majority. EMC ended on a hybrid approach.
- The network effect is highly valuable but offers funding model challenges. How should it be paid for?
- Old behaviors die hard. Closing the proficiency gap in the way people used to work was lead by HR. This is referred to as "social engineering."
- It's clear that the "default social media platform" needs to be centrally funded, centrally supported and made available to all comers in the company. Think of it like email or network connectivity. To do otherwise inhibits and delays business value.
- The rule about "no private spaces" is showing to create business value - everyone can see everything, and participate in anything, and that is proving to be far more valuable than individual, closed spaces. The larger your environment, the more important this becomes.
- I'm learning to think in terms of months and quarters, rather than days or weeks. Human beings need time to adapt and learn new behaviors.
- There's no question in anyone's mind that this was a good idea. All doubters, skeptics and proposers of alternative courses of action have now gone eerily silent.
- There's spontaneous, value-generating interaction. I don't want to share company secrets on a public blog, but there's at least 2-3 "aha!" moments I can point to that created substantial, non-arguable economic value through interactions and discussions.
Results
- It's now "cool" to be an active participant on EMC ONE.
- People are getting comfortable enough to find each other (even though they've never met), discuss topics, find a problem, and start working to solve it. I don't have a small number of examples, I now have a much longer list.
- Connected employees from distant outposts (like China)
- Creation of central research repository (value to EMC: significant. Incremental cost: zero)
- Product ideation (3 months of product research happened in the course of 48 hours)
- The formation of significant uses in presales and partner relationships
- Conversations have lead to better materials for the sales force.
- We now have so many business value stories that we don't really need any more to make our case, even to the most stubborn ROI cynic.
- I've got big hunks of business value to go point to (and more coming every day), but - more importantly - more people are getting comfortable and proficient with this whole thing.
I look forward to much more insight from EMC as they go even deeper into their evolution and I'll share whatever I can in subsequent posts.