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Unit 6: Collaboration Tools

platform to help us answer our need to bring tighter cross organizational collaboration” Notes
True to its research heritage, the company had experimented with various approaches.
“We had an old intranet that people seldom visited. We had multiple collaboration tools,
but unless you already knew about them, it was unlikely that you would stumble on them
and discover things of interest.” The company also tried Twitter-style microblogging, but
that didn’t address the company’s need for deep collaboration.
Rapid Deployment, Swift Adoption
Eventually the decision was made to go with Jive, and things moved ahead quickly. “The
roll-out was easy,” says Jem Janik, now enterprise community manager at Alcatel-Lucent.
“Three weeks after we signed our contract, Jive’s service team had migrated our sandbox
trial to a full production environment, and we opened the doors to employees.”
Alcatel-Lucent’s Jive-powered “Engage” community was launched in April 2010 with
little fanfare. “We didn’t feel it was quite ready for prime time,” Janik says. “We hadn’t
branded it with our own look and feel yet, and there was no corporate authentication. So
all we did to announce it was to send an email to 100 people who’d been involved in the
pilot, inviting them to try it out.”
The community team never expected what happened next. From those first 100 users,
word of the new community spread virally, and by the time Alcatel-Lucent rolled out the
branded, mature version of Engage several months later, 10,000 users had signed up. “We
were amazed,” says Janik. “We’d set an adoption goal of 10,000 for the first year.”
The community’s rapid growth was surprising not only because the company had done so
little to publicize it, but also because so many of Alcatel-Lucent’s employees weren’t
exactly members of the social networking generation (although the advanced
communications technology developed by Alcatel- Lucent had made the social networking
generation possible).
“We have a mature workforce,” says Janik. “So we thought it might take some effort to get
them using social business tools. But this is a technically sophisticated group and the fact
that they joined so readily speaks to the pent-up need and the willingness of this team to
experiment and try new things. Earlier file sharing platforms didn’t meet this technically
savvy group’s expectations of speed and efficiency, but with Engage, users could sign up,
launch a group, or start a discussion, and start working without any assistance. People
really took advantage of that.”

Major Business Impacts
Adoption continued to grow by leaps and bounds after the official launch, and today,
about 75% of Alcatel-Lucent’s 77,000 employees have joined the community. “Engage has
became the place where the majority of the company gets together to work and discuss
our business,” says Sold.

In responses to internal surveys, Alcatel-Lucent employees say Engage has made it easier
to reach people, to find information and experts, and to stay informed on the company and
its direction. “If you add up all the time savings and improved employee collaboration,
that’s a tremendous business impact,” says Sold.
The system has also improved top-down communications. Alcatel-Lucent CEO Ben
Verwaayen uses Engage’s blogging feature to communicate regularly with employees,
and other executives have followed suit. Verwaayen’s posts receive tens of thousands of
views. “Now employees feel they have a real dialogue with the senior leadership,” Janik

Contd....

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