Page 120 - DCAP307_PLANNING_AND_MANAGING_IT_INFRASTRUCTURE

Planning and Managing IT Infrastructure

Notes says. “It’s made us more of an open culture, and it’s increased broad participation and
effective decision-making.” Sold cites a few examples:

Alcatel-Lucent’s IT department was considering changes to the conference bridging
system that they thought would be more cost effective. After soliciting employee
inputs via Engage, they realized the new system would actually be less economical
in the long run, and they abandoned the plan.
Prior to its annual leadership meeting, Alcatel-Lucent held company-wide discussions
in Engage, gathering employee concerns and feedback, which helped set the agenda
for the meeting.

A product group wanted to brainstorm concepts for new mobile apps so it created a
group in Engage. They’d hoped to come up with 100 ideas in two weeks, but received
200. “The low barrier for open collaboration is bringing us plenty of useful ideas,”
says Sold.
Speeding Ahead
Employees continue to join Engage at a very rapid clip (500-1,000 per week), and as the
community grows, its impact multiplies. Janik and the community team aren’t sitting
still, either. They’re working with employees to drive greater activity and instill best
practices.
Among its planned improvements to the system, Alcatel-Lucent is looking to implement
both Jive’s mobile capabilities—enabling employees to access the community on the go—
and Jive’s SharePoint connector. “The two systems are complementary,” says Janik.
“SharePoint has good document storage and custom list capabilities. Jive is better at
supporting information discovery and sharing, discussions, and social interaction. Jive’s
ability to integrate with SharePoint means we can provide a seamless user experience
regardless of which environment you’re working in. In just three years Engage has become
ingrained in our corporate life, and Jive has really been a partner in making that happen.”
Question
Analyse the case study and describe how Jive helped in increasing broad participation and
effective decision-making.
Source: http://www.jivesoftware.com/customers/case-studies/alcatel-lucent

6.6 Summary

Collaborative tools are computing systems that include, as one of their major design
goals, features designed to facilitate work that involves more than one person.
Due to the growth of online tools (a.k.a. “Web 2.0”), the collaborative tools realm has been
growing very rapidly.
IM, sometimes referred to as chat or text chat, is a versatile, accessible, and almost
universally available tool that supports collaboration in multiple ways.
Skype is a VoIP application that allows users to collaborate over voice channels by calling
one another.

Twitter is designed to support micro-interactions—the incessant flow of the thoughts of a
friend or colleague that stream across your screen.

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