2. 2
Océ in Sum
Océ today:
21,500 people worldwide
Annual revenue 2009:
€ 2.648 Billion
Net Income 2009:
€ - 47.134 Million
Worldwide distribution in 90 countries
Direct sales and services in 30 countries
10 R&D-sites in 9 countries
Business: Printing, scanning, copying products
and services (B2B)
New!: Document Services Valley
7. 7
Results
2000+ members and growing
# active members growing
# different departments & countries growing
Usage pattern:
try microblogging, share some basic stuff
think about change info and communication processes
tie to business processes
Measure soft and hard value
Good morning! I’m Samuel Driessen, information architect at Océ, based in The Netherlands. I’m responsible for the information management improvement program of part of Océ.
We’ve been doing quite a bit in the social media/enterprise 2.0 space. In this talk I’d like to focus on and share our experiences with enterprise microblogging to improve information and communication processes.
Océ is a large international company, mainly focused on developping printers, copiers and scanners of all sizes. An important part of our business is business services. And I’m excited to tell you we recently launched an open network to collaborate with you or your company around document services, called the Document Services Valley.
We’ve been working and experimenting with social media for some time. In sept 2008 a colleagues of mine from communications and I decided we start with enterprise microblogging. Bottom up.
Two big reasons were: we saw the need for horizontal communication in our organization. There was no working method or tool in place to encourage and support this.
And secondly, we saw there was lots of focus on supporting formal/structured business processes. But supporting informal, unstructured information and communication processes was not addressed explicitly. It was our strong conviction these structured AND unstructured processes should be seen as a whole: they give context and meaning to each other. To me that also the meaning of social in social media.
In three slides:
[slide 4] many see the organization in this way (managers/IT). And lots of money is being spent on defining and supporting this process. Discrete steps, with data/info going for one step to the next.
[slide 5] most employees see it in a different way. It looks something like this. They see colleagues with certain expertise/information connected in a certain way. It’s a network or community of people.
[slide 6] As an information architect I find it important to see these worlds as a whole. They are both true. And they should both be supported in ways that are fitting.
The interesting thing is the debate around e2.0 is hot around this topic over the last three-quarters of the year. More discussions about Social business, BPM and social media etc.
At that time, in Sept. 2008, Yammer won Techcrunch Disrupt. We’d been comparing solutions and decided to go for Yammer. It was free and easy to set up. And free was a good thing due to Océ’s and the world’s economic situation at that time…
I can say microblogging has been a big success, also compared to other social tools we rolled out, like blogs and wiki’s. We now have over 2000 members and it’s growing and growing. We hardly advertised it. Word of mouth did most of the growing.
We see the number of active members also growing. >1% active users as in Wikipedia.
We see the number of different departments and countries growing. More use in Sales and Services for instance.
Usage pattern:
Start to try Yammer,
share some basic stuff,
after some time: start thinking about change info and communication processes in your team, project, department or over departments,
then: try to tie microblogging to business processes.
We also measure business value by asking users live and in Yammer. We ask for soft and hard results (numbers and stories).
Learning points:
- microblogging is easy for most, not for all. Don’t think you don’t have to train (functionality) and explain (concept).
- culture > closed culture, formal barriers between R&D and the rest e.g., communicate openly, management essential in the end for continuation. Make decisions what to share and what not.
- moderation is key > Yammer is a community, moderate it closely, encourage, connect, etc
We see Yammer showing it real value when it connects to the formal business processes. This is the present and the future for us.
We are currently experimenting with Yammer to improve information and communication processes between three of our chemical plants. To improve horizontal and vertical communication. They currently use paper journals. These aren’t shared between teams and plants. And not with management. We want to open this up to speed up the processes within the factories. By the way, this experiment was preceded by a project to work in self-steering teams. Culture change! And this experiment will be done in parallel with a project to improve decision making.
We hope to be able to share our results soon on my blog and/or a next conference/summit. I regret I can’t share results just now yet. As for now, management is very excited to move this way, the team leaders and operators are as well.