CSC’s C3 Employee Social Community Turns Two Today

As some of you might know, my day job at CSC focuses on our social business strategy. Two years ago today, my day job hit a great milestone, the day we launched our C3 employee community in pilot.

May 18, 2009

That was the date we launched our C3: Connect. Communicate. Collaborate. pilot to CSC employees. This pilot was limited in duration (six months) but not in audience (all employees from all business units or geographies could opt in if they wished). We launched the pilot as a strategic move in validating our business case and testing our adoption practices. By pilot launch 100+ global advocates, who had been our strategic planning partners, helped us seed over 200 groups and business use cases in the platform.

That pilot proved to be wildly successful. In just 20 weeks, 25,000 employees opted-in and registered in the pilot and helped us expand the groups to over 2000 groups. We were watching our metrics prove how successful the pilot was, we were hearing stories of how it was providing business value to our global teams and we were hearing stories of how the platform was winning employees hearts and minds.

May 18, 2011

Today we have over 88K+ registered users, a 69% monthly active engagement rate and over 10K+ groups in our environment. We completed a platform consolidation project just this past January and are about to launch new projects to extend our business use.

Our success with the employee community has led to the launch of a formal community program which has been extended to other aspects of our eco-system. Kudos go to so many involved in the project, both business leads, technical architects and the far too many to name list of over 100+ global advocates who helped us fuel the success of our platform.

C3 has truly changed the way we work

C3 meets all kinds of business goals by account teams, global communities, solution developers, project teams, learning professionals as well as executives and business unit for communication, collaboration and strategy alignment. We are amazed every month at the new business use cases our employees envision every day.

I’m sure many of you have similar success stories as well. What are yours?

CSC’s C3 Reaches Milestone In User Registrations

In just under 12 weeks of release, CSC’s “C3: Connect | Communicate | Collaborate” environment reaches a significant user registration milestone 22% user registrations, or 20,000 employees. At some point, I may make more stats more public, but we are certainly hearing great things from our users.

I am shocked every day when I boot up my computer at the passion our employees have for what we have provided. And I am grateful we have good early adopters, evangelizing this new capability and taking our experiment viral. I get elated when I see a new executive or ‘group president’ start blogging. And I am honored to have the executive sponsorship for this program that we do, who really understand why this is a core competency for our company and our employees.

And I am jazzed to start my day with testimonials like the following:

Not sure if anyone has told you personally, Lately!... Thanks so much for bringing C3 to CSC! I have been a long-time proponent of embracing Web 2.0.... As a "Digital Immigrant", I am just simply 'Proud 2 B CSC!'... Honored to see all of the "Digital Natives" take the baton and guide us in to Cyberspace! Proud 2 B CSC!  ~ Victor Malloy, CSC

CSC Announces “C3: Connect | Communicate | Collaborate.”

CSC just released “C3: Connect | Communicate | Collaborate”, a pilot program in enterprise social collaboration — linking people to people and people to groups.

As program lead, it’s gratifying to see the fruits of our yearlong effort in making the business case and planning for this moment. The main themes behind C3 are as follows.

Connect.

Employees will be able to connect with colleagues — time zones and distance will no longer be barriers to doing one’s job efficiently. Employees will be able to create and edit profiles, connect with each other, and have robust search and expert location tools.

Communicate.

Employees will be able to communicate with colleagues anywhere in the world to share what one knows or thinks. Employees will also be able to create personal blogs, group blogs, documents and discussions to share news or content with group members.

Collaborate.

Employees can collaborate and get work done with team members in the pursuit or support of client work. Employees will be able to locate or create groups along business topics or projects. They will also be able to join discussions or ask for help from colleagues across CSC. More importantly, collaborating on content and documents has never been easier.

And Finally, Make C3 Work For You.

With C3, employees can decide how they prefer to stay on top of community updates by customizing activity feeds, receiving email subscriptions or using RSS feeds. In C3, employees are now in control and can receive a 360-degree view of what’s happening.

We are exctied to invite our global employees shape the future of social collaboration and networking at CSC as they Connect, Communicate, and Collaborate with C3!

Join me September 8, 2011 at AIIM’s Virtual Social Business Conference

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting AIIM’s Jesse Wilkins and the fabulous Andrea Baker in the last year. And I’m excited they’ve invited me to participate in AIIM’s Virtual Social Business Conference coming soon on September 8, 2011.

This virtual event will run from 11 AM ET through 5pm ET and will be jammed packed with industry thought leaders and practitioners. Attendees can choose to attend sessions covering three main topic tracks:

1. Strategies – get strategies for engaging customers and empowering staff
2. Use Cases – learn from experience of early adopters and visionaries
3. Governance – learn how to manage social processes and technologies

When it comes to deploying social collaboration tools for the enterprise, you hear you can’t plan to go viral. But you can’t go viral if you don’t plan well. And how do you ensure that when you build the environment, your users will come?

Register to join this virtual conference and learn how CSC got beyond the “Field of Dreams” and went viral with their industry award-winning adoption practices for its employee community titled “C3: Connect. Communicate. Collaborate.” I’ll also share a glimpse at our expanding social business strategy, bringing state of the art collaboration capabilities to our eco-system of customers, partners and prospects.

For more information, visit AIIM’s Social Business Virtual Conference page, or register now!

Join me at J. Boye Conference in Philadelphia, May 3- 5, 2011

I will be speaking at J. Boye’s third North American conference in Philadelphia this May 3-5, 2011.

Billed as an idea sharing summit for web and intranet professionals, this conference promises to provide a fantastic learning and networking event for online professionals. In considering this event, I was immediately impressed with the simultaneously high focus on case study content and social events to enrich the networking experience.

I’ll be participating in two sessions.

Tuesday Tutorial: “Social Business Collaboration: A Practical Framework for Adoption, Staffing, Governance and Education”

Join my colleague, Megan Murray and me as we provide a practical framework for socializing your intranet.

Enterprises are increasingly evolving their intranets into state of the art social business collaboration platforms using Enterprise 2.0 technologies where employees can locate expertise and assets, engage and interact, and co-create and collaborate along work topics. Wikipedia defines Enterprise 2.0 as “the use of “Web 2.0″ technologies within an organization to enable or streamline business processes while enhancing collaboration – connecting people through the use of social-media tools.” This workshop will arm the practitioner with a working definition of social business collaboration while providing practical advice for making the business case for change, planning for deployment and adoption, deciding on community models and governance, planning for education and measuring success.

Thursday Intranet Track Case Study Presentation: “Getting Beyond The Field of Dreams: Building a Successful Social Business Strategy, Inside and Out”

Join me on Thursday as I shared CSC’s Case Study in deploying social business tools for our 93,000+ employee community.

When it comes to deploying social collaboration tools for the enterprise, you hear you can’t plan to go viral. But you can’t go viral if you don’t plan well.

How do you ensure that when you build the environment, your users will come? Come learn how CSC got beyond the “Field of Dreams” and went viral with their industry award-winning adoption practices for its employee community titled “C3: Connect. Communicate. Collaborate.” Finally, this session will conclude with a glimpse on how CSC has begun extending social business capabilities to its eco-system.

For more information about the session context above, check out “A Successful Social Business Strategy: It Can be Done“.

Be sure to sign up, if you haven’t already.

Enterprise 2.0: It’s No Field of Dreams (A CSC Case Study)

I always enjoy attending the Enterprise 2.0 conference, and last week’s conference in Boston was no different. Simon Scullion and I shared CSC’s case study story during our session titled “Enterprise 2.0: It’s No Field of Dreams”.

Enterprise 2.0: It’s No Field of Dreams

The 1989 baseball film “Field of Dreams” is often cited as the source for the memorable quote “If you build it, they will come.” In the film, an Iowa farmer hears a voice to tell him to build a baseball field and the ghosts of Shoeless Joe Jackson and other Chicago White Sox players will just show up and play. No business plan. No marketing plan. No plan at all in fact. Just the notion that if you build the ball park your players and your audience will just show up.

But we know that’s not the way business works. You can’t just install something without a business and marketing plan. In a business context, this is often used as a negative metaphor – people say “Don’t build it, and just hope they will come.”

Enterprise 2.0 is not a field of dreams. You need to plan to be successful. More importantly these tools are about people. You really need to understand how to engage your audience.

But how do you locate, find, inspire, motivate and orchestrate passionate advocates to help you engage your users? Well, CSC feels we had the winning combination to go wide, go global and go viral. Our case study talk during the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston last week described what CSC did to fill the seats at our baseball stadium of collaboration.

Adoption Planning: Plan for the People

So how did we do it? And — how is any of that different from any other large IT project? Well, most of us know how to roll out tools, get the system set up, configured and deployed. And we felt that we had done everything we could to prepare for a successful IT deployment. But we realized early on this could not be just another an IT project.

This was a tool for people. We knew we would ask users to evolve how they think about the nature of their work and the transparency with which they do that work.

You hear in the industry you can’t plan to go viral. I argue you can’t viral if you don’t plan well – - Claire Flanagan

So to view the highlights of our story, view our presentation now on SlideShare:

Below is a very brief summary of our adoption planning tactics:

1. Adoption Principles – Before we started we thought carefully about our adoption guiding principles, those areas that would shape how we would approach deployment. There are no right answers, no silver bullet, in fact the answers to any of these areas can vary for your organization and your culture. We addressed areas like executive involvement, listening and adapting to our politics and culture, thinking about taxonomy patterns and emergence, staffing for success (community managers and advocates) and other important areas.
2. Advocate Planning - We knew we needed to both quickly scale the efforts of our small project team, but also knew that we needed to reach out to our global users to help us go wide, global and viral. We located a team of 12 chief champions who helped us bring on another 100 advocates prior to our launch.
3. Executives as Advocates – We knew our executives were not only sponsors of our program, but they were also critical in “walking the talk” and showing that C3 was safe for business. Our advocates helped us engage executives as well as they worked with local management.
4. Seed Use Cases – No one likes joining a space that is empty. They don’t know what to do or where to start. Also, these tools have to be more than just “Facebook for the Enterprise”. Your executives demand it. We felt it was important to seed use cases that met our business goals, use cases that our global project, competency or community teams could start using right away. Our advocates helped us seed over 200 groups prior to our C3 pilot launch.
5. Watercooler – Don’t overlook the importance of relationships and the value of a ‘virtual’ watercooler – a location where pure “social” conversations are ok. We knew we needed to trust our employees, but we needed to also create ‘bump in’ opportunities where new relationships and trust could form.
6. Feedback & Transparency – We knew it was important to provide formal feedback mechanisms while practicing transparency. With the help of our advocates we engaged in both the easy and the tough conversations online – and we feel – earned the trust of our employees along the way.

The above are obviously only small summary points of our talk.

To hear the more specific tactics we used in our Adoption Planning, catch one of our upcoming talks at one of the many industry conferences coming up. Watch our blogs for where you’ll hear our case study next.

Enterprise 2.0: It’s No Field of Dreams- A CSC Case Study

For several months, CSC’s Case Study has gotten some industry attention for an Enterprise 2.0 program pilot that was so successful it acted as the final stage in making the business case for an ongoing production deployment.

Be sure to sign up for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston this June to hear both CSC’s executive keynote and a detailed breakout session.

CSC’s Executive Business Sponsor Keynotes June’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference

CSC’s executive business sponsor, Lem Lasher, President of Global Business Solutions (GBS) and CSC’s Chief Innovation Officer, will be a featured keynote at this year’s conference. He will talk about “The C-Level Perspective: Social Collaboration Fueling Innovation, Business Results and Competitive Advantage”

Session Abstract:

“CSC has had remarkable success with social business software through a strategic, award-winning initiative called C3 to “connect people to people, connect people to content, and connect people to communities.” This global social collaboration platform enjoyed early success during its pilot phase collapsing time zones, distance and organizational barriers, reducing business development time and driving revenue and innovation.

Join this keynote to hear CSC’s C3 executive business sponsor Lem Lasher give insight on why he chose to sponsor this program and how it aligned with CSC’s broader strategic collaboration and innovation initiatives required for fueling the company’s growth and competitive strategy. Finally, Lem will share his thoughts on successfully engaging executive sponsors and how to tailor your business case to the C-level.”

“Enterprise 2.0: It’s No Field of Dreams – A CSC Case Study”

CSC knew that success with an Enterprise 2.0 program required more than just deploying a tool, we knew it required planning for the people, planning a solid adoption program. Come hear CSC’s case study, presented by Simon Scullion and Claire Flanagan at the conference on Tuesday, June 15, 2010, 1:00 PM-2:00 PM

Session abstract:

“You’ve secured sponsorship for your E2.0 initiative. Now what? You know you need top management involvement to establish “formal” support. You’ve also heard you need groundswell support, too. But how do you get both? And what’s the right mix of each to foster success? And how do you ensure that when you build the environment, your users will come?

Come learn how CSC got beyond the Field of Dreams with a robust adoption campaign for “C3: Connect. Communicate. Collaborate.”, its global internal social business software initiative that collapsed time zone, distance and organizational barriers.  We’ll discuss our multi-tiered advocacy strategy that augmented our formal, global communication plan and provided the bottoms-up support that was fundamental to the viral, early adoption success of this industry-recognized global initiative.”

Be sure to register, if you haven’t already. I hope to see you there.

Enterprise 2.0 Internal Evangelist of the Year

Internal Evangelist of the Year 2009

On Tuesday, November 3, 2009 I was honored to receive The 2.0 Adoption Council‘s inaugural Internal Evangelist of the Year award at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco.

This was a great moment for me personally, but more importantly a great moment for CSC. At a time when few large case studies exist of companies making progress in large-scale Enterprise 2.0 deployments, CSC was able to demonstrate its thought leadership in this new area. We now are in the forefront of this area with the likes of Lockheed Martin, EMC and Booz Allen Hamilton in taking advantage of these newer type of tools enabling greater collaboration, collapsing time zone and distance barriers.

In just 20 weeks, our C3:Connect. Communicate. Collaborate. pilot achieved 25,000 registered users and over 2000 groups of interest. The metrics and user anecdotes from this pilots were so convincing that the pilot proved to be a successful 5th stage in our business case ensuring the continuity of the platform from pilot to full enterprise program.

This award was introduced at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference by e2 Moderator – Andrew McAfee, Center for Digital Business, MIT Sloan School of Management, Principal Research Scientist.

He coined the phrase “Enterprise 2.0″ in a spring 2006 Sloan Management Review article to describe the use of Web 2.0 tools and approaches by businesses. He is also a blogger about Enterprise 2.0 and his book Enterprise 2.0 will be published in 2009 by Harvard Business School Press.

Presenting the Award itself and a token gift was speaker – Robert Brown, SVP of Client Services, Jive Software.

In my acceptance speech I recognized the tremendous executive sponsorship we had behind this program and recognized Lem Lasher, John Glowacki, Ralph Pacheco, Dave Bogan, and Judy Annett-Donnelly for their sponsorship, guidance and support for this effort.

And of course, the success of our work at CSC would not have been possible without the hard work and dedicated efforts of our core team members John Chambers, John Macioci,Don Henn, our global advocates, and C3 lifeguards who worked so hard with us over the months to make the adoption of this program a success and beneficial to our employees.

Other Media from this Enterprise 2.0 Award Event

• To see the entire Award segment – visit E2 TV
• To view the SlideShow presented during the award segment, visit Internal Evangelist of the Year presentation
• Or read Jive Software press release about this award

About The 2.0 Adoption Council

The 2.0 Adoption Council is a collection of managers in large enterprises that are charting the course for Enterprise 2.0 adoption in companies with 10,000 employees or more. As “internal evangelists” we all share a common enthusiasm for bringing a new way of working to our representative companies. The “Internal Evangelist” (IE) has to carefully balance the needs of the business with an incredible responsibility to drive change in the organization with tools and practices that are outside of the comfort zone of most large enterprise employees, not to mention the pockets of organizational resistance predisposed to preserving Enterprise 1.0.

I am honored to network with awesome professionals from major enterprises. I have already learned so much from my council members and find it an incredible opportunity to ask and answer questions on adoption practices. I encourage new evangelists to get involved with the Council.

About the Internal Evangelist Award

One member of the 2.0 Adoption Council will be selected to exemplify the tenacity, courage, and sheer energy it takes to inspire a large enterprise to embrace the principles and practices of Enterprise 2.0. The award will be announced at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.

“…the job of the internal evangelist is far, far more difficult. These folks toggle between fighting the good fight every day and then slipping uneasily into a sort of DMZ where they can peek out into the broader community for support and the rejuvenation they need to go on fighting another day. It’s often a thankless job with no clear roadmap for advancement, yet the majority of them do it because they believe in the principles of the 2.0 movement. I celebrate them!”

Photos above

All photo credits above (c) Alex Dunn http://www.flickr.com/photos/adunne/tags/enterprise20conferencesanfrancisco2009/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic License.

CSC is awarded JiveWorld’s Inaugural Community Adoption Award

I received, along with a colleague of mine, John Chambers, Jive’s Community Adoption award at the inaugural JiveWorld conference earlier today. This award went to CSC for the launch of its internal community “C3: Connect. Communicate. Collaborate.”

Through the  tenacity, credibility and trustworthiness of those involved, the CSC team  secured a phenomenal level of executive endorsement from the onset and  established a clear linkage between its “enterprise 2.0″ initiatives to the  company’s core business strategic objectives. Through enabling a strong global advocate network and allowing collaboration patterns to emerge, C3 enjoyed viral  success in only 20 weeks, achieving 25,000 registered users, over 2000 new  groups and generating over 1 million page views a month.

The Community Adoption Award was set up by Jive with the following in mind:

Building a useful and engaging community is one thing, getting people to join the community and participate is another.

The successful launch of a community is a complex process involving multiple company groups to build buzz, educate users and encourage involvement. Many of Jive’s customers launch large marketing campaigns to promote a new community where others leverage word of mouth and other social media tools to drive people to their community.

We are honored to accept the award on behalf of many of our CSC team members and global advocates who worked so hard with us over the months to make the adoption of this program a success and beneficial to our employees.

Six customers in total, United Business Media (UBM), NIKE Inc., National Journal Group, CSC, Kaiser Permanente, and Swiss Re were recognized for outstanding achievements in their social business strategies. Read Jive’s Press Release for more details.