In Europe's biggest firms, social business is all grown up
Summary:Case studies demonstrate that some of the world's largest companies are now making advanced use of social tools in the way that they work. Is Europe leading the way?
In Paris last week at Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT 2015, it was shortly after the CIO of one of the world's largest organizations began walking through the progress of social business within her organization, that the realization hit: The leading edge companies are not really talking about adoption any more, that part is largely done, though plenty of work certainly remains.
Instead, the half dozen case studies from some of the largest firms in the world made it clear that leading organizations are now making advanced use of social tools in the way that they work.
The CIO in this case was Laurie Miller, of the $11.8B material sciences division of Bayer, whose impassioned explanation of how they dealt with the complexity of modern enterprise collaboration within a large organization was a highlight of the event.
The focus on making social collaboration a success over the last year at Bayer Material Sciences has been on making the tools more accessible, demonstrating the value of the approach in pilot projects, employing an innovative reverse mentoring program for senior executives, using a 'train the trainers' program to rapidly build foot soldiers who can widely spread know-how of new tools and approaches within the company, and steady communicating good practices and success stories as they emerge.
In turn, all of these efforts were carefully aligned with the company's mission and vision. However, after a year of the initial rollout, it was clear that adoption of the new collaboration tools had plateaued. The company, looking at the results so far and the ongoing challenges with less modern tools, decided to double down and take their social collaboration efforts to the next level.
Pulling together leaders in both IT and the business they established an ambitious set of goals for social business along with seven KPIs to measure success. The goals including fostering global collaboration, creating stronger networks across regions and departments, creating a culture of sharing that was less hierarchical, and several others. Not the least was focus reducing the confusion of which tools are intended for which job.
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In Europe's biggest firms, social business is all grown up