Enterprise 2.0 in Action: Internal Collaboration at Alcatel-Lucent

Last week, I introduced two extremely powerful web 2.0 tools and discussed how they might impact business productivity. In this week's blog post I'm going to present a real-life example of how a company - that is Alcatel Lucent - captures value through the use of Enterprise 2.0 technology.

A short introduction to the company

Alcatel-Lucent (hereafter AL), a merger of French Alcatel S.A. and US-American Lucent Technologies, is a multi-national company operating in the fields of telecommunications and networking applications and services. The company also owns Bell's Lab, which is a worldwide-recognized research institute.

 Source: Alcatel-Lucent (Marc Jadoul - http://de.slideshare.net/mjadoul/community-is-strenght-2012)

Enterprise 2.0 history at Alcatel-Lucent 

The first major web 2.0 tool emerged at AL in 2008 when Ask@Ben was introduced. Being some sort of modification of Yammer at that time, it mainly focused on interaction between the employees and the CEO. Soon, a lot of other tools such as an internal video channel and livechatting followed. However, as Dion Hinchcliffe points out in his blog, the use of many different channels became problematic so the company decided to integrate all of these tools in one (on Jive based) platform called Engage.

Source: Alcatel-Lucent (Jerome Colombe - http://de.slideshare.net/SocialBizForum/engage-within- the-digital-workplace-at-alcatel-lucent-jerome-colombe)

Creating Value

In 2012, the McKinsey Global Institute introduced 10 ways of how social technology can add value in organisations. These so-called value "levers" exist at multiple functional areas within the organisations (Product Development, Marketing & Sales etc.) as well as across the entire enterprise. 

Source: McKinsey Global Institute (http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/high_tech_telecoms_internet/the_social_economy)

Brought in the company under the slogan Connect-Collaborate-Contribute and serving as the company's social intranet, Engage clearly creates value through its enterprise-wide impact (see lever 9 & 10). Let's have a more detailed look of what was achieved at AL:

• Efficiency: As AL is heavily relying on tacit knowledge in their organisation, it is important that the internal platforms and communication channels facilitate the knowledge transfer. Just 1 year after the implementation of Engage, AL reported a massive increase in knowledge-related capabilities.
  
• Reach: Social intranets and collaboration tools such as Engage remove the boundaries between departments in an organisation and offer an easy and effective way to address a majority of the workforce in order to gather insights. For example, AL's management used feedback from the community to set the agenda for their meetings.
• Other: I really liked the story of AL's marketing department using pictures which had been taken by employees and shared in one of the internal communities on Engage. The resulting cost-savings are a good example of the direct effects of internal collaboration tools. On ther other hand, I believe the highly intangible effects on for instance the corporate culture are often overlooked (there is a short quote about this by Marc Jadoul though). 

This week I'd like to know your opinion again: Would you agree with what I pointed out in the last sentence that the intangible benefits of Enterprise 2.0 tools are often overlooked? Do you think this is because it is difficult to measure?

References:

• Colombe, J. (2012). Engage with the Digital Workplace, presented at the Social Business Forum 2012
• Jadoul, M. (2013). Knowledge is Power, Community is Strength: Experiences with Social Intranet at Alcatel-Lucent, presented at the VOV workshop on Social Media (October 2012) and J. Boye Intranet Group (February 2013)
• McKinsey (2013). The Social Economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies.