Guest blog post from Christoph Isenschmid & Wolfgang Jastrowski - Swiss Re, who are speaking on Beyond Enterpirse 2.0 conference in Amsterdam
Does an enterprise collaboration platform ruin or reinvent the traditional Intranet?
At Swiss Re, we have complemented our classic intranet with a modern global enterprise collaboration platform 2.5 years ago and enjoy great adoption and value out of it. Does this mean we have now a social intranet and what is it?
With help of Google I found the following definition by Toby Ward, CEO of President Digital Media:
“An intranet that features multiple social media tools for most or all employees to use as collaboration vehicles for sharing knowledge with other employees. A social intranet may feature blogs, wikis, discussion forums, social networking, or a combination of these or any other Web 2.0 (intranet 2.0) tool with at least some or limited exposure (optional) from the main intranet or portal home page.”
With our internal collaboration platform called “Ourspace” we established, successfully and globally, the above mentioned features and made them accessible for every employee in our company. Which fulfils another prerequisite listed by Toby for a successful social intranet: wide participation. Does this mean we are done by just linking our classic, vintage 1.0 Intranet to Ourspace? Is good enough to call both together a social intranet?
We don’t think so!
- There is no clear border line between the 1.0 Intranet and Ourspace that defines what should go where.
- Traditional intranet pages neither offer contextual information nor engagement possibilities such as commenting or rating
- There is no combined search over both areas
To address the first pain point, we plan the structure and align the content by including the following four content types:
- News
- Corporate Content
- Managed Communities
- Collaboration Content
Our goal is to provide our employees a seamless user experience in a new combined social intranet, offering activity streams and engagement possibilities across all four content types. Search has to cover at least all content in the social intranet and of our external website, to be extended in the future to a full Enterprise Search.
What is now the best way to implement these four content types and to leverage Ourspace? Some of them are obvious, like the collaboration content. This includes all content of all social groups and personal blogs we have in Ourspace. Similar for the managed communities where we already have a few spaces offering the community owners the required user restrictions not available in social groups. However many community managers are looking for better ways to structure their content, i.e. offering “traditional” content navigation. And this is as well a key requirement for corporate content, next to have approval workflows and templates. News is assigned to different categories that users can subscribe to, all have the same template and some categories require approval workflows. News can be shared and promoted horizontally and vertically.
So if we do not want to ruin our traditional top down intranet, then we have to reininvent it by bringing the two worlds close together or even merge them into one combined social intranet.
Would you like to meet with and learn from Christoph Isenschmid Head of e-Communication Channels & Wolfgang Jastrowski Head of Unite Communications and Collaboration – Swiss Re – come to attend Beyond Enterprise 2.0 conference in Amsterdam, January 24-25 2012.
About BE20 conference:
Beyond Enterprise 2.0 conference offers you access to a high level influential network of senior Internal Communication, B2E, Knowledge Management, Portal Directors and CIO professionals from the largest companies in the world.
The speakers presenting case studies on strategies of using social media to energize your employees for performance and change.
Book to attend keynote presentations, interactive workshops and case studies on how leading companies such as Ahold, GE, United Nations, Ericsson, BT, Electrolux, Elsevier, Dassault Systemes, S.W.I.F.T., A.B. Inbev, Swiss Re, SAP and others are implementing innovative strategies to achieve real and measurable business results.
Topics include:
- Maximising internal communications through social media tools and platforms
- Creating a strong brand internally whilst building motivation through video
- Building international communities, driving collaboration and expertise sharing by taking advantage of social media
- Understanding how to roll out an Enterprise 2.0 Strategy across the whole company globally
- Creating internal guidelines and a governance policy to ensure social media will be used in the most effective and appropriate way internally
- Effectively measuring ROI
- Incorporating online and social media tools into traditional Intranet platforms and communications
- How to ensure employee usage and engagement of Enterprise 2.0 initiatives
- Motivating employees through gamification
- Utilizing new web 2.0 tools to increase knowledge management
BE20 conference agenda and registration form
BE20 website
Book your seat now
