EMC Case Study

Social software as clean fuel for 21st century competitiveness

EMC provides the technologies and tools that can help companies release the power of their information. With EMC, organizations design, build, and manage the infrastructures necessary to store, protect, and manage information so that it can be made accessible, searchable, shareable, and actionable to exploit its value for business advantage. EMC has achieved double-digit revenue growth for the last five years operating in more than 60 countries and employing over 40,000 people who work with customers across industries from all size companies.

Business Opportunity

Building social media proficiency for transformation and innovation

Imagine a company able to go from selling enterprise storage arrays to being the fifth largest software vendor in the world. This is the kind of transformation that EMC has achieved between 2002 and 2008 while more than doubling in size. What made it possible for EMC to reinvent itself so radically? A fierce determination to listen to its customers and the ability to integrate acquired companies and leverage their skills to innovate.

Now try to imagine the type of proficiency such an innovative and successful company would want to develop in order to fuel its continued growth into the 21st century. What would allow over 40,000 employees across the globe to keep an intimate connection with each other? What would support new employees and acquired companies to rapidly integrate and contribute? What would enable the ongoing evolution of its culture so that everybody speaks as one regardless of their role and location?

EMC decided that it needed to foster the ability of its employees to engage in continued dialogue and conversations, breaking down the barriers of company, geography and role. EMC concluded that social software (or social media) was the vehicle to accomplish these goals.

“We realized that social media was not a nice to have, but a critical corporate skill that needed to be developed in order to be a competitive global company.” Chuck Hollis, VP of Technology Alliances

Solution

EMC|ONE community powered by Jive Social Business Software

For EMC the mission was business transformation and the goal was building proficiency in the type of conversational collaboration between employees that only social software enables.

From the onset EMC leadership made clear that the initiative was not about experimenting with web 2.0 technologies—success was not optional. The initiative was going to be run using collaborative enterprise 2.0 thinking and methods and would not fall back to conventional top-down approaches.

Technology Selection

EMC leadership was determined to move fast on the EMC|ONE initiative. In order to achieve its goals, EMC chose Jive due to its emphasis on people and conversations and its simple and intuitive interface. Other key factors in the selection included:

• Simple, integrated and clean UI
• Commercial product, commercially supported
• Extensible architecture to easily integrate with other applications
• Proven experience in large enterprises
• Simplicity of implementation

Implementation

EMC's marketing department created a dedicated team backed by executive sponsors. Phase I focused on internal collaboration. EMC would then expand to external communities (customers, partners, suppliers) after establishing a strong internal proficiency. The internal community was named EMC|ONE (Online Network of EMCers).

The team worked closely with human resources to ensure sponsorship for developing social media skills and with IT for technology enablement. It took only five weeks to go from technology selection to deployment. The approach was to keep things simple and let the community determine how it should evolve rather than over-engineering it from the beginning.

EMC|ONE went live in September 2007 with minimal fanfare. EMC let the community grow by word of mouth while avoiding the creation of any artificial barriers to participation. The project team seeded a few discussions about opportunities for creating community and improving customer experience. The community was intended to be totally self-policing and self-monitoring and to date there has been no need for management to intervene in a governance role.

“While most technology implementations require extensive gathering of requirements and upfront engineering, social software works best when you keep things simple and let the community itself determine how it should evolve.” Len Devanna, Director Web Strategy
EMC

EMC|ONE Community Stats

Results & Benefits

Business process transformation, connections, innovation

Social Business Software is like oxygen for EMC: they would seriously miss it if it wasn't there. In less than a year, one quarter of EMC's 40,000 workforce is on EMC|ONE, working together across divisional and geographical boundaries while building a new culture of collaboration and empowerment.

When asked about specific value produced, EMC leaders point to the feedback from community users who are excited about sharing real-time competitive intelligence, improving products, creating new ideas and being part of a progressive organization. For example, a post on green computing from an employee in Asia-Pacific drew interest across the globe and resulted in a new product idea. This would not have happened without the EMC|ONE community.

EMC|ONE positively impacts many business processes, such as: coordinating product launches, getting feedback for new products (accomplishing in a couple of days what would normally take weeks of research), improving overall quality and customer experience, sharing actionable competitive intelligence and several others.

• People with specific interests are finding other people with similar interests, breaking down departmental and geographic silos
• People are finding answers from other people instead of searching big content repositories, reducing support costs
• An organizational "social fabric" has been created that wasn't really there before resulting in improved employee retention
• The community is a container for corporate memory and mythology - it greatly accelerates employee on-boarding

“No other corporate resource gives me more value than EMC|ONE. I feel connected with what is going on, I understand our direction, and I get great satisfaction from contributing to people and initiatives across the organization that before I didn't even know existed.” EMC|ONE member

Having developed strong internal Social Business Software proficiency, EMC is now applying it outside the firewall to enable community with customers, partners, and suppliers.