Page 118 - DCAP307_PLANNING_AND_MANAGING_IT_INFRASTRUCTURE

Planning and Managing IT Infrastructure

Notes Self Assessment

State whether the following statements are true or false:
14. Tools that feel natural do not promote greater flexibility with interactions.
15. The tool that seamlessly integrates with other tools is more likely to be adopted.

Case Study Alcatel-Lucent Enters a New Era of Enterprise

Collaboration with Jive Social Intranet

lcatel-Lucent is a global leader in telecommunication technologies, including
mobile, fixed, IP, and optics, as well as a provider of telecom applications and
Aservices. The company is headquartered in Paris, with over 77,000 employees and
operations in more than 130 companies. Alcatel-Lucent includes research and development
pioneer Bell Labs and counts among its employees some of the most respected experts in
virtually every area of telecommunications.
Going Social
The journey began in 2009, just three years after the merger that teamed French telecom
giant Alcatel with U.S.-based Lucent Technologies, itself a descendant of Bell Labs and
Western Electric. The combined companies have a long record of technological leadership
going back more than a century. But like most companies, they were neophytes when it
came to social business standards.
Late that year, Alcatel-Lucent decided to shake things up, and began investigating potential
community-of-interest and social networking platforms. They implemented a pilot project
running Jive in a sandbox, and soon discovered that it could serve both as a community
platform and a social network solution. At the same time, company executives had become
convinced that they needed better cross-departmental collaboration. Jive looked like the
potential game-changer they were seeking.
Choosing Jive
Haran Sold, Senior Vice President and Managing Director of Business Operations at Alcatel-
Lucent, was tasked with finding a solution. He says Jive offered multiple advantages over
competing products: “The Jive platform impressed us on a number of levels. It had a rich
feature set of community and social functions, yet most people found it easy to use. It had
mobile support for anytime, anywhere access. We also liked the public and private cloud
deployment options, which gave us the option of hosting it on our own premises if we
chose.”
Sold noted that Alcatel-Lucent is a large company with resources and technical expertise
spread around the globe. “We have the usual challenges of a large global company, and
too often individuals had little visibility into what was going on beyond their own team,
even in some cases when that could make a difference in the work they are doing,” he says.
“We wanted to make it much easier for all of our people to be able to tap into our own
considerable expertise so we could leverage their experience as we work on solutions for
customers and enable all of us to work more efficiently. We were looking for a collaborative

Contd....

112 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY