Regaining Business Agility #e20s

At Track 2 of the Enterprise 2.0 Summit about 'Regaining Business Agility'. Track speakers are Bart Schutte (Saint-Gobain) and Flavie (Pernod-Ricard).

Saint-Gobain is built up out of lots of smaller companies. They started with Jive to support business collaboration for all businesses, all functions, all people.
They started with one business segment. The business objectives are:

  1. Enable global teams to form and work effectively (was not possible before, can't be done via email)
  2. Enable people to connect and build new relationships
  3. Enable greater sharing of information (more innovative, faster to market, more customer oriented)
The tool can meet many types of needs, from process, projects to functions and communities of practice (structured to unstructured).
So, people will be in many groups, it will be there workplace, and Jive should replace email. 

What did it bring them?
  1. New markets for existing products were found
  2. Faster time to market
  3. Improved R&D designs
  4. Increased employee satisfaction
Problem for them: 70% of the groups are closed. Will help them open up slowly.


How are they rolling Jive out? They use structured adoption.

  1. Adoption is lead by the business
  2. Adopt quickly
  3. Focus on structured groups for launch (3-10)
  4. Train users. And train again.
Currently 6000 people use Jive (of the 100.000 employees total), but they have touched every business.

Lessons learned:
  • Every company needs to find their own path and way
  • This is about changing user behavior (change is hard, even if you want to change)
  • It's about developing a new competitive advantage
Next up is Flavie of Pernod. The moved to a digital strategy. Four steps:
  1. Start of group of experts
  2. Use a group of evangelists to spread the word.
  3. Sponsor by CEO
They are heavily using iPhone and equipped their sales people with them (also use SalesForce). They also have a customer platform.

The keys to success:
  • Proper tools (computers and network, sales and iPhones, Managers and iPad)
  • We need time and change management (promote and seduce, explain, demonstrate, listen and adapt

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