Establishing social software to drive expertise exchange and how to measure it #epem

Wolfgang Jastrowski of Swiss Re is up next.

They use Jive for their intranet platform (out-of-the-box). The interesting fact is that they don’t train users. Wolfgang is from IT. They provided the platform and have users decide how to use it.

Blogging has not taken off as well as they thought. So they created roundtable to increase blogging.

How did they introduce social media tools inside? In 2008 the company realized that collaboration is key. They wanted a community centric collaboration approach.

Objectives:

• Better support virtual teamwork
• Boost information sharing across functions
• Accelerate agility and responsiveness
• Advance innovation and solution creation
• Etc.

In short: they wanted a platform that would support their cultural change.

They went live with Jive in Q3 of 2009. They then already had 1500 users. At the end of 2009 they had 10000 users.

Their key lessons:

• Strive for long-term objectives but work in phases and take the time needed
• Position it as an integrated business platform with a clear business benefit and visible executive legitimation
• Recruit advocates from core business functions as early adopters and role models. Develop business relevant use cases and educate on community management skills. The whole project was done with 5 people: 1 knowledge management, 2 communication and 2 IT.
• Simplify business case to avoid complex benefits measurement
• It is a change project, plan it that way!

Thousands of business conversations every month create business value. This leads to a business case. They collect good examples to build their case.

Other ways of measuring value:

• The number of conversations related to the number of people who have access. After a year 85% is on board. This is OK, but...
• … they would like to measure the quality of interactions. This can be done by like/don’t like or rating functionality. But will it work. Will employees judge each other’s work? That’s a journey they are now taking.

Question: You remarked that there is also a classic intranet, besides Jive. How will those relate? Answer by Wolfgang: More content is moving towards Jive. I think information like guidelines will stay on the classic intranet. Information that may not be changed/discussed about. The distinction needs to be clear, because users need to know where to look.