At the moment - the state of this blog is as much a collection of interesting blog references on the subject as they are my posts. The development has continued on: http://roii2.wordpress.com/

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

En Socialtext case

Under kontaktdetaljene mine kan du forovrig lese et kort utdrag av tilbudsdokumentet vi sendte til en kunde i Zurich som signerte med oss i forrige uke. Resonerer noe av den informasjonen med tilsvarende problemer du onsker a lose for StatoilHydro?
Mvh,
Jon G
Jon G Grorud
Sales Director, EMEA
M: +44 7766 461 523 E:
jon.grorud@socialtext.com
www.socialtext.com
Socialtext: The Leader in Social Software - Enterprise-Grade Wikis and Blogs
Want to find out more, please watch these unique screencasts:
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Wiki 101 – how to get started
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Miki – mobile access to your wiki
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Unplugged – offline access to your wiki

Background
As a leading global player in the Life Sciences supply industry, _____ is continuously seeking strategic competitive advantages through improvements in the way the firm harnesses and leverages the knowledge within the organisation. There is a level of consensus within _____ that some fundamental collaboration-, and knowledge sharing processes are sub-optimal and that improving these are of strategic importance to the firm.

Situation Today
During the course of the past couple of months, Socialtext has been invited to interview and discuss the current situation with several _________staff, including (VP, Head of Delivery Support) and ______ (Sales Manager, France). These conversations have been very fruitful in uncovering the current business challenges for the firm in the area of knowledge management and collaboration. In other words, the conversations centered on specific issues around ________ processes for the efficient capture, sharing, and reuse of the knowledge that exists within the organisation. Some of the issues that we heard are as follows:

  • · "There is substantial inefficiencies in the proposal creation process"
  • · "_______ participates in around 2,400 bids / tenders a year – the proposals are not always as accurate as they could be"
  • · "We deliver around 600 projects a year – important knowledge from these projects is not captured properly so that it can be reused by Sales and Delivery Teams"
  • · "It takes 6-9 months before a new sales person is up-to-speed"
  • · "Sales People are often struggling to find the right experts internally during the sales process"
  • · "Customers are sceptical of custom applications and request documentation on previous project expertise"
  • · "Updates to Product Roadmaps get emailed out to Sales and Delivery Teams – they need to keep a library locally"
  • · "Some days the same question is asked 3 times to the Expert Lines"
  • · "It would be easier to resolve implementation problems if we could easier find the relevant Application Specialists"
  • · "There is a lot of pressure on Support to answer questions quickly"
    · "Implementations have errors and take time to get corrected"

These issues can be grouped into three recurring themes:

  1. Knowledge Capture and Sharing could be better
  2. Finding the Experts inside the firm is difficult
  3. Problems on delivery projects are repeated

And the business implications for ______ of these issues are as follows:

  • Wasted resources through duplication of efforts
  • Competitive advantages based on existing expertise and knowledge is not leveraged fully
  • Information silos are barriers to sales repeatability
  • Limited teaming across geographies
  • Costly problems on delivery projects could have been avoided
  • Trapped expertise – hard to know who to go to

Solution Desired
From our conversations and the workshop we ran in Zurich on June 12th, it is clear that ______ managers across Sales, Frontline Support, Project Delivery, and Product Management recognise the potential for an Enterprise 2.0 platform to:
• radically improve collaboration within a geographically dispersed organisation
• make it easy for people to contribute and share knowledge that already exists within the firm
• make it easy for people to discover and reuse knowledge that already exists
• allow people an easy way to find the experts within the firm

Such an Enterprise 2.0 platform thus needs to include the following components – an enterprise wiki (collaborative web pages to create a Participatory Knowledgebase); business social networks capabilities (a people directory that will allow people to easily find the relevant experts within the firm); and the appropriate enterprise integrations with _______ existing systems (such as Salesforce.com, Microsoft Outlook and Office, Blackberry and mobile devices, and Active Directory integration for a seamless user experience). Furthermore, the enterprise wiki needs to have a completely customized look and feel and navigational properties that are consistent with _______ visual profile and branding policy.

The final critical component of the solution sought is the consulting services and expertise that Socialtext offers around its social software platform. These services include ongoing consulting for the training, adoption, and roll-out; design and deployment of a customised look and feel of the wiki; the prototyping of the wiki (setting up structure and workflow and seeding it with content); and custom technical integration services. The services engagement plan is described in more detail further down in this proposal.

For the initial six months, _______ will be in a proof of concept phase where the Enterprise 2.0 solution will be rolled out to various groups of users, and where the required services is offered to ensure this project will be a great success