My Enterprise 2.0 Rollout: 4 Keys to Success

CIO — Early this year, executives at Philips, a global healthcare, lighting and consumer lifestyle business, initiated talks on selecting and deploying an enterprise 2.0 suite for its 100,000 employees worldwide.

The business's key performance indicators

These needs aligned with two of the business's key performance indicators: driving enterprise collaboration and productivity. "We work a lot in virtual teams, so we needed to connect better. There is a lot of knowledge in the company, but we needed a better way of unlocking it."

After exploring several solutions, de Vries and his team selected Socialcast as its provider for the enterprise collaboration component, primarily for its ease of integration with SharePoint 2010. The suite, which they internally named "Connect Suite," integrated e-mail, SharePoint solutions, chatting, VoIP, Web meeting solutions, Web casting, telepresence and Socialcast's microblogging tool. IT launched a month-long pilot program of Connect Suite with 1,000 users, which de Vries says was hugely successful.

1. Begin with a clear strategy. Don't explore an enterprise collaboration solution blindly; have a clear understanding of which issues it will solve and how the company will benefit. Philips wanted to dissuade employees from flocking to external sites—as well as encourage collaboration and communication—so including Socialcast's microblogging component in its suite made sense.

2. Partner with the business. "You have to realize that these are not IT initiatives, these are IT and business initiatives," de Vries says. The deployment was as successful as it was, de Vries says, in part because it aligned directly with the organization's key performance indicators, making the intended ROI transparent from the beginning.