What you can learn from EMC’s Internal Communities.

I had the opportunity to check out EMC’s internal Enterprise 2.0 community the other day.  And more importantly I had a chance to meet Len Devanna and Jamie Pappas personally.  I’ve been following them on Twitter (@LenDevanna and @JamiePappas), but meeting people in person is always much better, especially people you follow already. 

Len and Jamie showed me EMC One.  There are already some nice write ups on it here on the Fierce Content Management site and very thoughtful analysis of it here on Sam Lawrence’s fantastic blog.  So I don’t feel the need to get into details about this effort.  Rather I’d like to focus on some takeaways that I think are memorable and can teach you lessons about how to run your Enterprise 2.0 initiative.

First, let’s start by understanding that a company as large and complex as EMC is going to face natural challenges when undertaking an Enterprise 2.0 initiative.  In addition to being a large corporation with many diverse products and many recent acquisitions, employees are dispersed throughout the world.  Quite naturally, no employee knows everyone they need to know within the corporation. Although each employee might do great work, most are simply unfamiliar with parallel activities going on in other business units.  EMC One addresses the challenge by providing employees with over 160 different communities they can join to discuss work projects.  And that number is growing.

The communities at EMC range in size and scope across many of the business activities.  There is healthy representation from all levels of management and staff.  Len and Jamie estimate about 25% of the workers at EMC actively use communities by either contributing to or at least finding information on a community site on a regular basis.  About 65% of EMC’s  employee population visits EMC One at least once a month.  The adoption of communities at EMC is quite healthy.  The fact that over 160 different thought-leaders approached Jamie at some point and said “my group needs one of these too.” is a great indicator they are providing tangible, visible, and broad value to the workplace.

We got onto the subject of measurements and had a great discussion about some of the softer metrics that they are trying to track to get a sense of the health of their communities.  I thought these were very insightful, though at the same time, very hard to measure.  I’ll share a few of the ideas we discussed, and encourage you to see how you can apply these ideas to your communities.  An important one is that about 95% of the communities on EMC One are open and searchable by any employee within EMC.  Whereas most people who approached Jamie asking for a community immediately requested that it be private and inaccessible, many were convinced of the value of having an open conversation. Though, of course some were legitimately the kind of communities that you really want to lock down – hence the 5%.

Len and Jaime observe that most of the conversations shared in EMC One communities are about internal EMC information.  EMC folks are talking about EMC projects, ideas, solutions, etc.  And that makes the initiative highly valuable.  I find that many newly formed communities start off by just sharing links and talking about stuff one finds on the Internet.  Eventually as the community forms around the core topics that unite them, they evolve the conversation and focus on their internal information.  So I find this as a measure of maturity also.  I’d note that you certainly want to see external information being shared in a community also.  Too often, people find an interesting link and simply e-mail it to their teammates.  This is a pattern that causes wasteful emails and information that is ultimately lost. However when these links are shared in a community site, they are visible, searchable, and live beyond the one day that we notice our email inbox. EMC is keeping an eye on the mix and nature of the conversations – and it’s a good idea for you to do the same with your internal communities too. 

Another mix that Len and Jaime are paying attention to is the amount of purely “social” conversations that take place within a community.  A healthy majority of the information shared within communities is strictly business-related.  Although social networks are indeed social, workplace social networks must focus on the workplace.  Our intuition tells us that having no social conversation on a social network might cause the site to be too sterile and uninviting. So allowing some social interactivity is a good idea. After all that’s why companies have baseball teams, summer outings, holiday parties and other get-togethers; it’s good for business.  And as a community manager, it’s a great idea to keep tabs on the mix to make sure that it’s healthy and reasonable.

One of the best practices that EMC One follows is having a community of community managers. I once described something like this here.  The way EMC implements this is that every community has at least one dedicated manager and all the managers touch base with Jamie and each other to leverage ideas and develop consistent practices across the communities. Of course, they each have autonomy and can make the changes that fit their community’s needs too.  But the good news is that they’re not on their own struggling to create standards and practices without relying upon the wisdom of other community managers. 

Running a community platform like EMC One is no small challenge. However the overall experience for the employees who participate is incredibly positive.  Len and Jamie capture many success stories that result from conversations that could never have taken place without the community.  They have wonderful examples of cost saving initiatives, and a great example of the sale that was closed as a result of an important conversation between a salesperson in Australia and a co-worker in North America who “met” in the community.  These employees never knew about each other, and will probably never meet in person.  But their conversation led to closing a deal.  Cool!  I’d guess that many such deals take place exactly this way, but we don’t always know how to attribute it to the conversation and the community.  When we do, we’re inspired.

We have to learn from the successes of those who are doing a great job at implementing E2.0 initiatives in a large companies, such as EMC.  Let me know if you want to apply these ideas to your initiatives too.  I’m glad to help.

Tagged as: collaboration, community, Enterprise 2.0, success story, workplace