Overall strategy for employee portal evolution into an enterprise 2.0 platform and integration of effective use of social media for employee engagement and internal communications #epem

Next up is Viviane Dupre of Bombardier.
Bnet evolution will be done in a more formal and structured approach. It’s more than intranet; an enterprise 2.0 implementation.
They have high level management buyin for the project. A heavily organized governance model.
Current version of the Bnet employee portal is from 2004 with less than $100.000 investment. It replaced 100 plus intranets. They have 350 content managers. Minimal governance at the content level. Bnet has been identified as a business critical application.
In May 2009 they did a survey. 5000 employees responded to the survey. 64% gave a negative rating of the home page. They also asked what employees actively used on the internet. Like Youtube, LinkedIn. 42% were contributors in 2009.
This project was also used to improve employee engagement. By empowering employees, be recognized. Increased employee engagement should lead to increased customer engagement.
They wrote up a mission for the Bnet. Stressed enabling and increasing productivity.
Three pillars of Bnet: Communication, Personalization, Collaboration. She does not use the work ‘social’ because of the negative connotations it has to some.
Bombardier also uses Wordpress for their blog platform. They are working on a internal Youtube. Not so much for formal communications, but for human interest.
Personalization means LinkedIn type profiles on the company directory. Picture, short bio, blogposts, expertise, etc. Employees can fill in what they want.
Collaboration is about the deployment of collaboration tools to support dialogue, professional networking, communities of practice and collective intelligence.
They are still researching if their new platform actually contributed to improved employee engagement. The results have just been collected.
What are the business benefits?
  • Increased employee engagement
  • Adapt to new reality. Viviane also relates to what young employees expect of corporate tools.
  • More efficient use of staff
  • Lower computing costs
  • Reduced travel expenses.

They consider themselves as followers and tap into experiences from other companies, wrt. tools, business case, etc.
They chose Sharepoint as their defacto platform. (This was decided by IT…) She's not sure if SP will replace WP, but SP will be overall platform.

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