Models for the Social Business Transformation #e20s

The 2nd day at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit starts with a panel discussion about 'Models for the Social Business Transformation' (track 1). Panelists are Luis Suarez (IBM), Jerome Colombe (Alcatel-Lucent) and Nicolas Rolland (Danone).

Jerome starts with a presentation about his experiences at Alcatel-Lucent. This company is in a huge transformation. The transformation was done in less than 2 years, and started just after Ben Verwaayen started at Alcatel. Engage has become part of their DNA.
They set up a platform called Engage. Now with 60.000 profiles (80% of the org.) and 4.000 groups. There are two official community managers, but the rest is managed by the employees themselves. People decide for themselves what they do with the platform.
They analyze what's happening in the platform with social network analysis.

Benefits for Alcatel were:

1. It restructured the internal communications
2. Commitment to convince and help colleagues (engagement of whole of larger part of organization)
3. Emergence of crowdsourcing principles

Risks and pitfalls (the dark side) are:

1. Copycat of bad hits (copying the existing the existing silos, official vs UGC for comms)
2. Bypass organizational decisions (challenge all decisions made before, sensitve topics, question re-organizations)
3. Questioning impacts for social networting (overload of info, anonymous comments, outdated threads)

Alcatel learned as they went along.

Nicolas also tells about the social business steps Danone is taking. Collaborate, innovation and acceleration were drivers for the roll out of social networking tools in 2009. Opened it for everybody (100.000 work at Danone, 40.000 have a computer). In the 1st year 10.000 people joined. The system allows you to fill in a profile with skills and create communities.

After the 1st year they wondered how they would reach everybody. The network was not the intranet (and it should be they found). So they worked on connecting to mobile devices (with wifi access everywhere within Danone) and video. They are also trying to move towards integrating learning and gaming in the network.

Danone does not find that English should be the main language in the network. English is not used the most in Danone anyway (more Spanish, Indonesian).