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c h a p t e r3 :BUILD A SOCIAL BUSINESS■Connect Employees to Employees
If knowledge assimilation throughout an organization is the goal, what’s the path that
leads there? Enterprise applied-knowledge sharing applications are part of the answer.
Lotus Notes was one of the earliest providers of peer-to-peer shared workplace com-
munications tools. Newer enterprise platforms include Basecamp, DeskAway, Lotus
Connections, SharePoint, and Socialtext. Regardless, they all provide straightforward
whole-organization implementations that can be adapted for nearly any application.
For those with very specific needs, or simply a sense of adventure, programming frame-
works like Drupal can be used to create solid internal (and external) infrastructures
from the ground up. However you choose to build your organizational applied knowl-
edge sharing platform, the essential objectives are covered in the following section.Clear Policies
The first element of any social or collaborative undertaking is setting out clear policies.
Applicable to any social technology application, establishing up front who can post,
what they can and cannot say, what the rules of conduct are, etc. Most organizations
will quickly recognize the need for such policies on external efforts: If not, the in-house
legal team will quickly step in. The same considerations apply internally. Employee law-
suits and the issues that cause them are avoidable: Too many out-of-the-box intranet and
knowledge-sharing applications are still launched without an adequate policy review.
That’s a roadmap to trouble. You can use Google to search for Intel’s, IBM’s, or similar
organizations’ policies on social computing: They will provide a great starting point.Specific Business Objectives
Business objectives are next: Why are you doing this? When we first rolled out IBM’s
PROFS and later Lotus Notes at Progressive in the late ’80s and early ’90s, there was
an overall business objective along the lines of “connecting people and tapping syner-
gies” but not a lot else in the way of a definition or expectation. It was as much an
experiment in innovation processes as a defined strategy for communication. To this
point—I was part of it and loved every day of it—the idea of connecting employees in
ways that broke existing hierarchies was new and the concept appealing.
Progressive has always been a dynamic, innovative company, and so a certain
amount of pure experimentation fit into its culture. At the same time, not too long
after rollout it became apparent that a lot of unstructured conversation was taking
place, at least partly because the 1,000 (give or take) employees at the time realized—
for the first time—they could talk to anyone else in the organization instantly. Because
there were no specifically articulated and measurable objectives, it was hard to push
back against it, to channel the energy where it would do some (business) good. Over
time, business goals, policies, and expectations evolved and the platform became an
integral part of work. So, outside of experiments, start with business objectives: By