Story

Story: Building participation by enabling virtual communities across the organization

by Patricia Romeo - D Street Leader at Deloitte

December 7, 2010 at 12:21pm

5 Comments

11 Ratings:

Overall 4.545
Innovative 4.73
Detail 4.36

Contribution Summary

Summary

For the past 3 years, Deloitte has been hosting an enterprise social network, D Street, to build connections, enable collaboration and foster innovation across the organization. This year D Street evolved to support internal strategic communities, a breakthrough enhancement that supports everything from collaborative onboarding to JIT social learning. In 2007, Deloitte launched D Street. In January, 2010, the entire enterprise portal was migrated to the same platform to manage document repositories and establish employee communities around practice areas, clients, diversity groups, and other business activities. The result is an engaging platform that supplements authorative content with user generated comments and social filtering. In addition, it connects communities to content, people and market practices across the organization. Part of the reason for the popularity of the system are the extensive use of links to dynamic profiles; the empowerment of users to manage their own activity streams according to interests even from their email and PDA. Deloitte believes that the result is a rich, vibrant and participative environment and provides an engaging employee experience.

Moonshot(s)

Context

Deloitte, who recorded $10.98 billion in U.S. revenues in 2008, ranks among the nation’s leading professional services organizations in audit, tax, consulting and financial advisory services. Please see www.deloitte.com/us/about for a detailed description of the legal structure of Deloitte LLP and its subsidiaries.

Triggers

To connect people across functions and build an organization of participation.
To enable collaboration on ideas and projects
To build communities of practice and interest
To enhance knowledge about one another
To empower people with a personal branding page
To personalize the talent experience and make our really large organization feel smaller

Key Innovations & Timeline

July-07	Creation of D Street, a Facebook-like enterprise social network secured behind Deloitte's firewall
August-07	Alpha pilot of 3,000 people across all functions
January-08	Beta pilot for 10,000 technology and talent professionals
April-08	Consulting Launch
May-08	AERS and FAS Launch
July-08	Tax Launch
January-10	Integration of the DeloitteNet portal with D Street and launch of microblogging and some communities
June-10	Launch of virtual communities
December-10	Launch of video platform
January-10	Launch of mobile platform

Challenges & Solutions

Legal considerations of open user generated content displayed throughout the employee portal
Risk considerations of proprietary or confidential information being shared
Privacy violations of information being shared without permission
Copyright violations of external information flowing into the internal portal without permission
Employee relations concerns regarding inappropriate content being shared or harrassment activity
Leadership alignment around new ways to communicate
Internal communications alignment around enabling new forms of communication

Benefits & Metrics

In 2007, the business case for developing D Street had 6 major drivers:

To connect people across functions
To enable collaboration on ideas and projects
To build communities of practice and interest
To enhance knowledge about one another
To empower people with a personal branding page
To personalize the talent experience and make our really large organization feel smaller

3 years later, D Street and the new DeloitteNet have achieved those objectives and more. Many business advantages are now being realized that were never even envisioned. Below is the list of additional benefits:

A WYNIWYG workplace
Colleague and thought leader tracking
Streaming relevant information
One Deloitte
Directories and distribution lists replaced
Expertise location
A millennial friendly environment that makes us more attractive
Demonstrated diversity
JIT communities for learning and collaboration
A social learning environment
Integrated on boarding
Total mobility
Content filtered as users rate and recommend
A “me” centric experience
Since launch, D Street has become a very popular application at Deloitte. 70% percent of our professionals have personalized their profiles and D Street receives an average of 514 visitors per day. D Street now hosts over 100 communities, 2,500 blogs and 85,000 and is the place to connect at Deloitte.

Lessons

A streamlined process for community creation is critical, along with an approval process with strong organizational representation.

Community management is essential with emphasis on the role of a community manager, and training.

Connection to people as essential as connections to topics and content and easy links to all three are essential. People drive interest to content and other people.

Communities are a natural way share formal authoritative content that may exist elsewhere with user-contributed content and commentary. It generates participation across the organization by encouraging people to discuss what is going on in the organization.

Employee social networking and internal community support can complement and add value to an enterprise portal by providing a social layer through which to navigate, explore and comment on authoritative content.

An enterprise portal can provide authoritative content and a work context which individuals can link to and organize from their personal or community perspectives.

Focusing on existing communities with known needs, purpose, committed participants and established governance principles lessens the need to manage change and motivate participants.

Credits

Patricia Romeo is the leader for Deloitte LLP’s social networking application “D Street.” Under her direction, Deloitte has leveraged innovative networking technology to strengthen employee relationships, enhance internal communications, improve recruiting and retention efforts, and facilitate idea generation.

Patricia has market eminence as a thought leader in the enterprise social networking space and through her leadership, D Street has been featured in several external publications, including the August 2008 edition of Computerworld in an article titled “The new employee connection: Social networking behind the firewall” and the October 2008 edition of HR Magazine in the article “Intranets Foster Teamwork, Communication”. She was a speaker at the Workshop on Social Networking in Organizations for the 2008 CSCW conference and at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston in 2008 and at several Regan conferences.

Patricia is a member of Deloitte’s Talent group and has been with the organization for over 10 years where she has held various positions. Prior to Deloitte, she was the director of recruiting for Computer Sciences Corporation.

Input

Comments

Paul Gromball

January 9, 2011 at 2:46am

Hi Patricia, how do you see the cloud computing impacting the development of Enterprise Social Networks.? Cloud computing provides in my opinion flexible access to the resources needed to address the unexpected Enterprise Social Networks provide easy access to sophisticated tools and highly flexible IT resources for the people on the edges of the enterprise who are confronted with unexpected business challenges. These unexpected business challenges are far more prolific on the boundary of enterprises. They require workers to respond quickly and to pursue a number of solutions, often without any certainty about outcomes or time for extensive planning. The people encountering these challenges often are not in a position to get the central IT organization to support their efforts. With cloud technology and mobile, they don't have to wait for approval by a central IT organization — they can quickly ramp up alternatives and pursue parallel solutions. Because access to tools and resources doesn't require major investments or time-consuming implementations, cloud technology and mobile encourages improvisation, experimentation, and tinkering in Enterprise Social Networks — within and across enterprise boundaries.

Is there any "cultural" reason Deloitte Europe in not using your great collaboration platform?

Mike Richardson

January 4, 2011 at 7:20am

Hello Patricia - I enjoyed reading story and all of the benefits that can flow from a virtual collaborative community. I just posted my latest submission/Story entitled, "The Power of a Peer Group: How come something so proven is not more pervasive, and what are we willing to do about it?" at: http://www.managementexchange.com/story/power-peer-group-how-come-someth...) and wondered what your thoughts are about the blending of these two approaches (which i speak to in the Challenges & Solutions section - the 3rd challenge/solution). My sense is that neither is as powerful alone as they can be together. Thanks again for sharing. Best.

Jonathan Grudin

December 9, 2010 at 4:09pm

I work as a researcher and consultant to development teams in exactly this area, and have been following Patricia Romeo's work closely since I first learned of it two years ago. In fact, I have twice hosted her visits to my organization to give very well-received presentations on D Street. It is a carefully designed system with a model organizational deployment, a hard-headed consideration of what is needed to improve the system and inform subsequent features or versions. It is an outstanding effort in an exceptionally important, fast-paced, and complex space. It is great that Patricia Romeo shares what she has done and learned with the larger professional community.

Eric Sauve

December 8, 2010 at 11:31am

Great story and clearly a path towards getting employees engaged and participating in the business. From the "Corporate Lattice" which Patricia references above "Companies with high [employee] engagement scores deliver better results than those with low scores. Earnings per share growth is 160% higher. Return on assets is 100% higher. Revenue growth is 150% higher" and so on. Thank you for sharing Patricia.

Suzanne Vickberg

December 6, 2010 at 1:43pm

I’ve been with Deloitte just over a year and have found that D Street helps me connect with my new colleagues in many different ways. For example, I always check someone’s D Street profile before I meet with them for the first time (face-to-face or over the phone), because it gives me some insight into them as a person and helps me identify the kinds of commonalities that are so important for forming and strengthening relationships. I also enjoy being a part of several communities, including the Remote Employee community (I work from home), the Northeast Women’s Initiative community (I’m a woman in our Northeast region), and the Corporate Lattice community (like everyone at Deloitte, I’m part of our efforts to strengthen our own corporate lattice culture as well as spread the word about what we’re doing). And just last month D Street helped me reconnect with a former colleague. I didn’t realize she had returned to Deloitte until I got a notice from D Street that she was a “recommended colleague” based on our similar interests. In an organization with 45,000 U.S. employees it can be a challenge to form strong connections – D Street makes it easier.