Jivespace : Document List - Internal Collaboration

New document

communities@jivesoftware.com — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 22:07:08 GMT

This is a new document

How to Add Wiki Wins

ted.hopton@ubm.com — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 20:52:25 GMT

This is a sample document related to the Knowledebase case study

Background

Garbage in, garbage out -- that's why it's important to follow these procedures when you add your wiki win. We want a gold mine, not a garbage heap!

What's a Wiki Win?

A wiki win is any positive outcome related to the wiki. All of our wiki wins aggregated across the company will constitute a comprehensive answer to the simple question, "What are the benefits of using a wiki in our company?"

Big Wins, Little Wins

Not every win is a big one. The little ones count, too, because they add up. It's true in the marketplace and it's true in the wiki, too. So, list them all!

Why Add Your Wiki Wins?

We can all learn from each other. Adding your win makes it available for others to learn and perhaps replicate it in their area.
We need to demonstrate the benefits of the wiki. As with every business expense, we are obligated to justify that the benefits outweigh the costs.
We expect to mine the data in the Wiki Wins Database to identify patterns and trends. We'll analyze the data and learn from it.
Finally, it's required . Wiki wins are the most valuable KPI (key performance indicator) we have for how effectively business areas are using the wiki, so each wiki steering committee needs to make sure their wiki wins get recorded here. Wiki wins get reported to the executive team and board of directors.

How to Add Your Wiki Win

Each wiki win documented in here becomes a record in the database. To add your wiki win, you need to follow these simple procedures so that your win will be indexed in ways that others can easily find it.

Create a New Document in this Space

Click on Create a New Document or select New - Document and be sure to accept the default setting, Write a New Document.

Title Your Win

Use this syntax to title your new document:

Wiki Win: Short Descriptive Title

Placing "Wiki Win:" at the front will make it easy to identify as a wiki win in search results. The short descriptive title will help people who search or look at tag results to see whether it's a topic that interests them.

Describe Your Win

It's not necessary to write a lengthy case study about your wiki win (although case studies would be most welcome!). Here's what you need to include when you add your wiki win:

Describe what you did, including how the wiki was involved.
Explain the positive effect or beneficial outcome. If money was involved, provide numbers if you have them, or make your best estimate.
Indicate who was involved: Division, team and initiator (if applicable).

Tag Thoroughly

We're using the tags on these documents to query this database. Without sufficient tags, we won't be able to access the record of your wiki win. So, tag as follows.

List of Required Tags

Every wiki win needs tags for these items.

Division

Use one of the following tags to indicate your Division:

(company-specific list of tags redacted -- create your own)

Department

Add tag(s) denoting the area within your division that was involved. Be sure to use underscores to create a single tag from multiple words, if needed.

Names

Add tag(s) with the first_name_last_name of the people responsible for the win. We'll be able to filter on those tags to see who's the biggest winner!

Date

Add a tag for the month (spell it out, no abbreviations; e.g., march) and year (e.g., 2009) that applies to the wiki win. If there's no specific date, use the month and year the win was logged here.

Size

Pick a tag to represent the size of the win.

Big (let's alert the CEO!)
Medium (nice job, let's spread the word so others can try this)
Small (not what could be called big or medium, but still it's a win!)

Type of Benefit

If the win involves cost savings or revenue gains, tag it accordingly:

cost_saving
revenue

If it's a "soft" benefit, use one or more of the following, or if these don't apply come up with your own and add them here:

engagement (for a win that promotes employee or customer engagement)
retention (for a win that improved employee or customer retention)
innovation (new ideas)
collaboration
cross_division (for a win involving more than one division)
cross_geography
culture
efficiency
morale
time_saving

Other Helpful Tags

What other ways could you tag your wiki win to help people find it? Look at what you've written up and add representative tags that reflect what the win is about.

Publish It!

When you're done, hit the Publish button. Thanks!

How to Create a Knowledgebase Using Clearspace/SBS

ted.hopton@ubm.com — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 20:48:02 GMT

Background

When combined with a defined tagging scheme, tag clouds offer a database-like capability to filter and select specific records, making it easy to create a "knowledgebase" application in Jive Clearspace/SBS with no programming or customization required.

This document illustrates the approach with a specific example.

Background
What's a Knowledgebase?
Why Create a Knowledgebase?
An Example: Wiki Wins Knowledgebase

How Does the Knowledgebase Work?

Records = Documents
Tag Cloud=Retrieval Method
Tagging Rules: Required and Optional

Flexible and Adaptable Concept

What's a Knowledgebase?

I'm using the term knowledgebase to describe a system that offers functionality similar to a database application, but is

not data oriented or intensive (and has no calcuations)
requires no database programming or interaction or SQL
easily manages user-generated content in free-form formats

Why Create a Knowledgebase?

A knowledgebase enables people to readily share their knowledge and tap into the knowledge of others. Of course, that's the general idea behind social business software (to use Jive's apt phrase), but a knowledgebase gathers together in a dedicated space many, many "records" which can be sliced and diced in valuable ways.

An Example: Wiki Wins Knowledgebase

We have an internal instance of Jive Clearspace, currently serving 4500 employees, and it's been named "the wiki" (never mind that Clearspace is much more than a wiki -- that train has already left the station -- it's "the wiki"!). We're six months into our implementation and we want to know what value the tool is providing. What benefits are we getting from it? And our CFO really wants to know the ROI (and I really want a good answer to give him!).

Since "standard" metrics around social media and communities are pretty much non-existent, I came up with the simplest measure possible: a win. A win is any benefit at all, no matter how small. Any time using the wiki helped you do your job or produced any kind of positive outcome, that's a win.

So, we're spreading the word that wiki wins count, they are important, and we need people to report them. Not only do we need to make it super-easy for people to do this (or they won't), but we also need a way to make sense of all the data we plan to collect. We need a knowledgebase.

How Does the Knowledgebase Work?

Records = Documents

Every knowledgebase record is a separate document. These documents are the "data" that the knowledgebase contains and can filter. So, we established guidelines for creating a document, or in our case, writing up a wiki win. Here's a copy of our document as of March 20, 2009 (recognizing that the original is a wiki document and is continually evolving): The specified document was not found.

Tagging Rules: Required and Optional

We believe in the value of folksonomy more than taxonomy, but there are times when a tagging scheme is invaluable. To make the knowledgebase work, everyone needs to follow the tagging guidelines. (see: The specified document was not found.)

We have a set of tags that are required so that the knowledgebase will return the kinds of information that we need, but we recognize that creators of content know their material best, so we also encourage them to add any other tags they think would be helpful. We expect over time to identify new categories of tags that are adding value, and may move some of those to the "required" list.

Flexible and Adaptable Concept

The knowledgebase created in a space is potentially a flexible and adaptable approach for organizing all kinds of information. I came up with it originally as a calendar of events. Each document was to describe a specific event in as much detail as needed, and the tagging scheme would let us filter not only by date, but by whatever other criteria we wanted. From there it was natural to apply the concept to wiki wins. And we are just getting started!

Next up will be applying this concept to our Help Wanted space, where we have job postings from across the enterprise.

Using internal social network to assist onboarding of new employees

barry@jivesoftware.com — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 23:15:49 GMT

Summarized from Gia's blog post. Make sure you read the entire post!

Your Onboarding Team

Get Legal involved
Ask HR, IT, Product, Services etc. to monitor the new-hire space
Find your cheerleaders

Onboarding Recipe for Hiring Managers

Show them their space
Show them their group
Show them your cheerleaders
Show them their accidental mentors
Show them how to customize their homepage.

How are you using your internal social network/community for onboarding?

How Best Buy Profits From Its Employee Community

smith_carl@hotmail.com — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 12:27:18 GMT

Interesting recent WSJ article on how Best Buy is using social tools such as:

Imaginary Stocks Let Employees Forecast Whether Retailer's Plans Will Meet Goals
Community Bulletin Board Lets Employees Help Set HR Policy
Frontline Employees Help Senior Managers Make Better Product Buying Decisions by Predicting Sales

Do you have examples of how your company is tapping the internal "wisdom of the crowds" to improve business performance? Please share.

Best Buy Taps 'Prediction Market'

By Phred Dvorak, WSJ

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122152452811139909.html?mod=wsjcrmain

When executives at electronics retailer Best Buy Co. want to know if a new product or idea is likely to succeed, they can seek the opinion of rank-and-file employees by turning to the company's "prediction market."

The market, called TagTrade, allows Best Buy's workers to trade imaginary stocks based on answers to managers' questions. The market's judgment has often proved to be more accurate than the company's official forecasts.

TagTrade is open to all of Best Buy's 115,000 U.S. employees. The roughly 2,100 of them who choose to participate get $1 million in fake money to trade for a nine-month period. The top trader in the period wins a $200 gift certificate.

Jeff Severts, a 38-year-old executive who is currently chief of the company's Geek Squad personal-computer maintenance services, spearheaded development of the market. Mr. Severts says TagTrade helps flag potential problems early.

In January, he asked both his management team and the market to predict sales of a new service package the company was offering for laptop computers. A week before the company began selling the product, the market's guess was 33% lower than the team's official sales forecast. It subsequently sank further.

When initial sales figures confirmed the market's prediction, Mr. Severts ended the offer and began redesigning the service package. He listed a TagTrade stock to gauge the revised package's chances of starting on time, in mid-September. The stock rose, and Mr. Severts says he took "great comfort from that." On Sunday, Best Buy started offering the new package.

Best Buy isn't the only company using prediction markets as a way to tap the knowledge of front-line employees. Web-search giant Google Inc. uses them to solicit forecasts on everything from how many users its Gmail service will attract to whether products will launch on time. Other companies that have experimented with them include General Electric Co., Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp.

Best Buy's chief executive, Bradbury Anderson, encourages experiments like TagTrade that seek to drive decision-making down the corporate ladder and information up toward the top.

Last year, two marketing employees, working on their own, created an internal electronic bulletin board called Blue Shirt Nation, a reference to the trademark garb of the retailer's sales force. The bulletin board's 24,000 users post questions for co-workers, comments on work policies and personal videos.

Tim Sheehan, a senior vice president, watched the bulletin board closely after Best Buy decided to reduce its employee discount last year. Mr. Sheehan, who had participated in the decision, emailed fellow executives, quoting some of the fiery reactions that were posted on the site; the company reinstated the larger discount within days.

Mr. Sheehan now scans Blue Shirt Nation daily. In November, he helped start another site that lets employees with business ideas seek help and funding from elsewhere in the company, bypassing the normal chain of command.

Mr. Anderson, the CEO, says narrowing the gap between management and workers helps to make his Richfield, Minn.-based company more nimble and responsive to customers, while boosting sales and profits.

To encourage more open lines of communication, Mr. Anderson, who says he remembers how distant corporate headquarters felt when he was a Best Buy clerk in the 1970s, invites management gurus like James Surowiecki, author of "The Wisdom of Crowds," to address his employees.

Inspired by Mr. Surowiecki's thesis that a crowd, collectively, can make better decisions than individuals -- even experts -- Mr. Severts decided three years ago to test whether Best Buy's workers could outperform its bosses.

At the time, Mr. Severts was a marketing executive looking for ways to improve the accuracy of Best Buy's sales forecasts. He emailed hundreds of Best Buy employees asking them to guess how many gift cards the electronics retailer would sell in February 2005.

As a group, the employees' guess was more accurate than Best Buy's official projection. But, Mr. Severts recalls, the forecasting director for gift-card sales said her team felt humiliated.

As a result, Mr. Severts says he learned to keep his experiments from seeming like personal attacks on the competence of his fellow managers. He explains his work at employee gatherings, using PowerPoint presentations that compare Best Buy to a centrally planned economy like the Soviet Union and feature portraits of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong. Those leaders, like many managers in big companies, were prone to bad decisions because they were too far from the front lines, Mr. Severts says.

In 2006, armed with Mr. Anderson's support, a $50,000 budget and some volunteers, Mr. Severts widened his experiment to include a prediction market.

To spark interest in trading, Mr. Severts listed stocks on political contests and DVD sales; one asked how often Mr. Anderson, the CEO, would use the expression "lifestyle groups" during a conference call.

Mr. Severts moved slowly, wary of ruffling more feathers or forcing his ideas on skeptical managers. Seeking more credibility for his results, he enlisted researchers from the University of Chicago to study how market guesses compared with official forecasts. He hopes to get the results later this year.

Other Best Buy managers have started floating stocks. Earlier this year, Rob Rausch, a senior manager two levels below Mr. Severts, created a stock to gauge the likely reaction to a price increase for PC maintenance services. Managers of Best Buy's private-label business floated a stock to help predict sales of a new digital-TV converter box.

Despite Mr. Anderson's encouragement, employees say most of Best Buy's management innovation still emerges from isolated pockets of the company, and depends on the benevolence of bosses who permit work on pet projects.

Mr. Severts says he is glad Mr. Anderson doesn't force reluctant managers to change their ways. "Nothing would squeeze the life out of TagTrade faster than putting it at the top of a priority list," he says.

One of Mr. Severts's latest stocks asked if Best Buy's information-technology department would finish a planned systems upgrade by mid-September. The market correctly forecast that the department would miss its deadline, but Mr. Severts noticed a glitch: most of the tech work was done by employees of consulting firm Accenture Ltd., who didn't have access to TagTrade. He proposed opening the market to them as well; Accenture managers say they are interested in participating.

How do you manage different written languages?

communities@jivesoftware.com — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 15:21:10 GMT

hgfhfhgfgg As an internaggggggggggggggtional company, we have over 20 different native languages spoken/written by our associates. Our current policy for the Clearspace comgggggggggggggggggggggggmunity's written language is as follows:

Use English please. This community supports an international team of corporate employees that communicate primarily in English. Also, we ask that native English speakers write plainly without too many cultural frames of references that are unique to a single region, area, or business unit -- and, be patient with non-native writers.

How are the rest of you handling this issue? Is confining the community to English only a usage good idea? Should we allow international teams to create spaces for communicating in their native language?

Hi Carl,

Check out Nike football for one example of managing multiple languages within a thriving community.

Thanks for posting this question - it'll be interesting to hear what the other opinions are.

In the past I've recommended starting with your approach -- one language. Over time, you can create new spaces or areas of the community for speakers of other langauges if there's enough demand for it. It's the same approach for adding new communities - start small and add them over time.

I was visiting a customer in the Canadian government who by law has to provide their services in English and French. One of their chief collaborators brought up the issue of language. Although this person was a strong English speaker and presenter, she said that her complete opinions and voice only come out in French. It was interesting to hear her opinion from such a proficient English speaker.

If you are interested Carl, I can pass along your contact info to my contact there.

Regards,

Jim

I like the Nike idea of selecting your language Thanks! The only problem I see with our company is someone selecting their native language yet trying to collaborate with someone in another contry utillizing thier native language (like european spanish and english). Will the claerspace solution support the translation capabilities automatically for these instances?

I like the Nike idea of selecting your language Thanks! The only problem I see with our company is someone selecting their native language yet trying to collaborate with someone in another country utillizing thier native language (like european spanish and english). Will the claerspace solution support the translation capabilities automatically for these scenarios?

This is not to mention all the rich media content that is language specific, we would need to find a way to replace the content on the fly to support the language of choice.

If not we go back to a common language theme in which Carl mentioned earlier.

Interesting challenge. What to do???

Bruce

Great discussion! In my experience as an IBMer - one of 350,000 worldwide employees - it was understood that the international business language was English. So, if you needed to collaborate internationally, everyone used English. Otherwise, use your native language. Trying to create an environment where everyone can understand everyone else, is, in my opinion, unrealistic. Unless everyone can speak "math". :)

Also, using machine translation servers to translate content has never really worked. They're good at translating the gist of the content, but not the nuances, colloquialisms, etc. Ain't nothing like a real human being doing the translation.

I've seen companies employ translators to translate critical content into supported languages, but everything else is left to grow organically.

I fully agree with you. The technology for doing this (especially on the fly) is not perfected.

Have you run into anyone that refused to standardize on a common language for their communities?

On another note we have found in places like Argentina that the people prefer to write than speak. They feel (and so do I) that there english is better written than spoken.

Good discussion and relevant for what "fun" i'll be dealing with in future, throwing my weight into this just for the heck of it.

"How are the rest of you handling this issue?"

In much the same way, "english" being the standard, however as a mainly social venture theres abit more flexibility for us, a "common curtosey" rule will be inplace, simply "While english is preferd, if those you are currently engaged with can -all- understand and communicate in an alternate language feel free until the situation changes".

"Is confining the community to English only a usage good idea?"

In a very wide and "fluid" community setting a "standard" is a very good idea, unfortunatly some may feel "left out" or worse "discriminated" against, however you cant "please" everybody.

The downsides to it are primarily exclusion, not just of people who cannot yet speak english who could bring needed talents or experience, but also of idea's, language its long been proposed "dictates" thought, people who do translating sometimes note that how they veiw something or conceive of an idea changes based only upon the "language gear" their mind is in.

"Should we allow international teams to create spaces for communicating in their native language?"

So long as you have people "loyal" enough to tell you what is being said in the languages you cannot understand and the spaces created for/by the international teams have a large number of "crossover" points with eachother and the main community such a move -could- be beneficial to all concerned.

the main risks are

"backstabbing" if you dont understand the language the group could easily be being discurteous of someone outside it.

"fear of backstabbing", one group being"paranoid" of another purely because whats being written isnt understandable but mentions a name.

"Divorce" if the international groups cease communicating outwards as often as they did while under the "english only" rule, the groups themselves can drift further and further apart to the point of becoming "introverted" and ineffectual.

[Fin]

Great discussion!

We, as a company, not as a community site, operate an English only policy. We have customers from all over the world, Middle East, Continental Europe, Africa, etc, but just don't have the capacity to: employ multi-lingual translators, or to pay for translation services.

We do find that in the industries we sell to, English is spoken by almost everyone, but perhaps we are missing out on some customers who can't, or don't want, to speak English.

We also have some fun on the forums when using our British English and some of our customers and partners use American English

Hi Carl,

One of the issues missed here so far is that of cultural blocks to participation based upon language skills. In our work with SAP many years ago, we did a lot of research into this issue. While most senior level managers are very comfortable using English in business, many lower level employees who are considered bi-lingual are not comfortable using English in a community. They will if required, but their participation levels will be lower than expected. The main reason is that they do not want to make a public mistake in front of superiors.

We've found that starting in English is fine, but to capture the rest of the audience local languages will be necessary at some point. Most employees in English required companies (SAP, Cisco, Intel, IBM) will use the site just fine without any problems.

As for requiring translations to make sure you know what's going on, that's a trust issue. Either you trust your employees to use the tool properly or you don't. If you must know every word that is put into the community, then keep it in English. But that kind of defeats the purpose of internal collaboration, no?

Regards,

Mike

Being in Canada, we have a sizeable amount of French speakers. The content posted online will always primarily be English but a good start would be for us to be able to offer our users the ability to change their interface language -- something that I understand Clearspace is supposed to be able to support but apparently it's not quite there yet.

We are looking to expand our community internationally through a partner organization so this discussion is very relevant to me. As we are in aviation, which uses English as a semi-official language, it would be very easy for us to simply say that everything will be in English. That probably will be what we *mostly* do. Latin America can be a bit of a different beast, though, and we may set-up a Nike-approach Spanish community or set of communities in which the content would be Spanish primarily.

This document was generated from the following thread: The specified thread was not found.

The Changing Business Model

communities@jivesoftware.com — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:33:25 GMT

The 12 Principles of Collaboration

communities@jivesoftware.com — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 17:44:01 GMT

Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise: McKinsey Global Survey Results

smith_carl@hotmail.com — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 16:03:35 GMT

Enterprise 2.0 Use Cases

barry@jivesoftware.com — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 20:32:00 GMT

Great article from Mashable: http://mashable.com/2008/07/17/social-media-for-business/

It provides some examples of "social media" for the business. I've summarized them below. Please feel free to add what you've done.

Human Resources

Introducing new employees via internal blog or rich profile (At Jive we encourage new employees to create an introduction blog post a week after they start)
Employee Newsletters
Training
Learning 2.0 (employees uploading short videos or podcasts to help colleagues learn something)
Sharing of recruiting "Best Practices" across global team

Sales

Sales collateral - via wiki, or central file store with comments
Lead generation - by creating a presence on LinkedIn or Facebook
management communications

Marketing/Communications

PR - external corporate blog
Interactive newsroom
Better Customer Engagement
Competitive Intelligence Library (both published & "heard on the street")
Thought Leadership - like Clearstep

Product / Design Group

Customer Support
Product Prototypes - collaborate in real time with 3D models in virutal worlds
Innovation - internal or external platform for ideation.
SME "email relief" - create a space that holds pages, discussion forums, blog posts and more to communicate expertise proactively, and to answer questions

Projects

Requirements/Capabilities
Functional Design Documents

Jivespace : Document List - Internal Collaboration

New document

How to Add Wiki Wins

** This is a sample document related to the Knowledebase case study **

Background

What's a Wiki Win?

Big Wins, Little Wins

Why Add Your Wiki Wins?

How to Add Your Wiki Win

Create a New Document in this Space

Title Your Win

Describe Your Win

Tag Thoroughly

List of Required Tags

Division

Department

Names

Date

Size

Type of Benefit

Other Helpful Tags

Publish It!

How to Create a Knowledgebase Using Clearspace/SBS

Background

What's a Knowledgebase?

Why Create a Knowledgebase?

An Example: Wiki Wins Knowledgebase

How Does the Knowledgebase Work?

Records = Documents

Tag Cloud=Retrieval Method

Tagging Rules: Required and Optional

Flexible and Adaptable Concept

Using internal social network to assist onboarding of new employees

Your Onboarding Team

Onboarding Recipe for Hiring Managers

How Best Buy Profits From Its Employee Community

How do you manage different written languages?

The Changing Business Model

The 12 Principles of Collaboration

Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise: McKinsey Global Survey Results

Enterprise 2.0 Use Cases

Human Resources

Sales

Marketing/Communications

Product / Design Group

Projects

This is a sample document related to the Knowledebase case study