Case study: Intel benefits from social intranet [kwiqq]

Posted on | August 13, 2009 | 2 Comments

Intel recently released their Enterprise Social Computing strategy, download PDF. The document clearly illustrates that Intel has thought through it’s strategy carefully to achieve business goals. Social media can sit alongside intellectual property and corporate rules and regulations have been very well highlighted in this report.

Risk Assessment

Intel rightly analysed the risk involved in integrating social networking tools for it’s employees mainly for knowledge management, collaboration and streamlining internal processes. They found that internal social computing tools hosted on their own servers were much less risky than using external tools. This for example mitigates risk of employees posting their personal details on blogs and profiles.

Policing employees social media presence

The overhead of tracking all the social media activities around the web would be large. Intel instead spent time in educating it’s staff on social media and it’s usage. In their own words:

We decided that best security approach was to provide employees with guidelines for self-policing their activities.

Benefits

Intel saw variety of benefits of using social media in their intranet:

Global communication at your finger tips: Given the  globally dispersed teams who find it challenging to accomplish their work. Due to time zone differences, there may be as few as two hours per day during which team members can communicate with each other in real time.

New employees want to integrate into Intel faster: Social computing could help new employees quickly learn about the company and discover which colleagues they need to connect with. This would improve the integration experience, leading to faster engagement and happier workers who become productive more quickly.

Personalise experienced:  Employees may work closely with people worldwide, but in many cases wouldn’t recognize team members if they passed in the hall.

Increase profit and save money: For example, a recent employee blog post asking for ideas to help Intel save money quickly generated an overwhelming response, including practical ideas that could contribute directly to Intel shareholder values.

Specific examples

Design Engineers generally have extensive knowledge of tools and processes. The engineer must collaborate across organizations and regions. The engineer’s challenges lie in knowledge sharing and work flow management.

Benefit: Social media enables him to find information faster (wikis, blogs, really simple syndication [RSS]); reduce redundancy (wikis, blogs); and connect to others in the organization (find expertise using professional networking tool, network analysis).

Sales Engineer generally has extensive knowledge of his customers’ product lines and their needs. His job is very fast-paced and he needs to find the right information quickly. He needs content that is tailored to him; the doesn’t have time to sift through data he doesn’t need.

Benefits: Social computing enables him to find information faster (wikis, blogs, RSS); reduces time to find people with the right expertise (professional networking); and reduces information overload (RSS, integration of information, content delivery to mobile devices).

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