There is a deep gulf between the sterile, one-way and almost Orwellian practices of the corporate IT network and the rapidly-evolving, chaotic organism of today's Intranet.
What would it look like if the social world of Web 2.0 collided with the corporate Intranet? What would happen if information was disseminated from outside in, instead of inside out; from the people working on the front line? This is precisely what an interesting experiment at global consulting firm Capgemini is revealing. Many of the company's 110,000 people are based on site at client locations and it is here that 'real-world' challenges must be addressed. The IT consultants in particular, who form about half of the workforce, are in an environment where the information they use goes out of date very quickly.
To help keep its teams up-to-speed, and to stay on top of the disruptive changes in their operating environment, Capgemini began a few years ago experimenting with Yammer, a private and secure enterprise social network that allows colleagues to hold conversations, read posts and actively collaborate with their co-workers in real-time. CTO Andy Mulholland says that it is contributing to the "collective consciousness of the 20,000 people who subscribe to Yammer internally."
Management's changing role. Capgemini uses Yammer for: aligning activities, problem solving, information sharing, providing clarification. Now think about the things managers do for a living - and you quickly end up with a pretty similar list. Social networking technologies, in other words, are increasingly being used to provide the support and input that employees used to get from their managers. This frees up managers, in turn, to spend more time on the real value-added work - such as motivating their employees, structuring their work to make it more engaging, developing their skills, securing access to resources, and making linkages to other parts of the organisation. Warren Buffett is famous for saying that it is only when the tide goes out that you can see who is swimming naked, and the same metaphor applies here: when employees can get all the basic support they need for their work through Yammer, rather than through their line manager, the real qualities of the line manager are exposed and some are found wanting.
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What would it look like if the social world of Web 2.0 collided with the corporate Intranet? What would happen if information was disseminated from outside in, instead of inside out; from the people working on the front line? This is precisely what an interesting experiment at global consulting firm Capgemini is revealing. Many of the company's 110,000 people are based on site at client locations and it is here that 'real-world' challenges must be addressed. The IT consultants in particular, who form about half of the workforce, are in an environment where the information they use goes out of date very quickly.
To help keep its teams up-to-speed, and to stay on top of the disruptive changes in their operating environment, Capgemini began a few years ago experimenting with Yammer, a private and secure enterprise social network that allows colleagues to hold conversations, read posts and actively collaborate with their co-workers in real-time. CTO Andy Mulholland says that it is contributing to the "collective consciousness of the 20,000 people who subscribe to Yammer internally."