Story:
Cutting through BigBlue Tape: Using Collective Passion to Scissor Bureaucracy at IBM

The Social Business adoption initiatives at IBM are successful precisely because they draw together individual influencers from all areas across our global organization who have a passion for engaging in social collaboration. While the tools and environment certainly existed where these passionate users were involved, it took a deliberate approach to bring them together, build a common goal, have common activities and imbue a collective presence and reputation across the company.

To get a feel for the amount of online collaboration activity that occurs behind the IBM enterprise firewall today, we have: 

• 630,000 user profiles and identities (including all employees and contractors)
• 74,800 communities and user groups
• 105,000 bloggers inside the firewall
• 1.3 Million shared social bookmarks
• 203,000 shared or team acitivities
• 475,000 files shared and 9.5 Million file downloads
• 50,000 wikis and 38 Million wiki page views
• 50 Million instant messages sent every day
• 30 Million minutes of web conferencing a month

This high degree of activity and adoption follows the growth of the BlueIQ Ambassador community of volunteers over the years since 2007 as well (Please see the image attached in the Materials section at end of this Story). In particular, note that we are looking at regular (meaning weekly) habits among IBMers beyond the passionate volunteers of Ambassadors as the indicator. Also note that the growth has continued without the need for a linear growth in volunteerism. In other words, there is an enduring effect inspired by the passion of the volunteers that continues to spread across the company. 

The benefits are most visible in the human impact of the success stories of how individuals and teams are finding their own ways to overcome large-scale bureaucracy through direct social collaboration. Our employees document their own collaborative successes in an internal blog while the BlueIQ program team intentionally scouts for stories by role and region. To date we now have over 200 success stories ranging from how individual employees discovered new ways to collaborate to entire teams teaching themselves and others how to work together across multiple regions and projects.

Within the following stories, we see the ways employees are discovering balance in how to develop their own networks of natural hierarchy within the masses of IBM globally. We also see how they are achieving their specific business goals, and how, through these stories, they become inspirational models to follow:

• One fundamental change in how our executives communicate direction to all employees in their organizational units is a shift from sending out broadcast email to interacting in online communities. These communities also serve as way to accelerate enablement and training to employees beyond traditional mechanisms and into social and peer-to-peer learning.  

  For example, the IBM Collaboration Solutions (ICS) Sales community is the centerpoint for an ICS Live Social program engaging salespeople to collaborate and participate in social networks and highlight their successes. The community hosts regular conference calls with the VP of ICS Sales, and allows sales representatives to continue the conversation online even while they travel. Salespeople use the community as a way to bring questions to each other around common issues or tactical objectives. 

  The ICS Sales community initially consisted of only the employees directly reporting to the sales executive, but has since expanded to twice its size since launch, drawing members from across IBM. This expansion continues helps reach across silos in different departments, expanding the value of the community beyond its original intentions. 

  Use of the community to communicate information reduces the need to schedule meetings and discussions among a population that is by design worldwide in many time zones, and facilitates consistent direction for the worldwide sales team on sales goals, business offerings, and team achievements. Sales people gain time to focus on their work.

  Across IBM this same model of communities per organization unit or department repeats many times over. In the IBM Collaboration Solutions organization, for example, the General Manager of ICS has a community for the entire organization, and in turn, each executive in Marketing, Sales, and Development for their business segments.  These communities reach beyond the boundaries of the organization by influencing other areas of IBM such as HR, CIO, Services, and other Software brand organizations. This cross-silo operation radically reduces the number of communications and improves accuracy of those messages, as well as allowing transparency across each executive’s common themes and messages. 

• At two locations in IBM India, there are more employees than available in-office seats, due to some employees working remotely.  When remote employees would come into the office, they wouldn't know whether an empty seat meant someone was out of the office or not. The employees needed a system to help identify open seats in which room and building on what day. 

  Rather than adding a bureaucratic layer to manage these logistics, the employees use the IBM Connections Activities tool to allow individual users to identify when their seats are free, and allow others to respond when they would be using it. This logistics issue was solved through an ad hoc social process created, operated and self-managed directly by employees, without the need for software developers to build a tool, or the approval of their managers.
   

• The IBM HR Center for Advanced Learning (CAL) worldwide team needed to coordinate their day-to-day tasks, how they allocate team members to different projects and tasks, on-board new talent, and keep each other informed on their diverse activities. They use a wiki to:
  • Welcome new team members
  • Provide an overview of what the team does
  • Set expectations
  • Share information on portfolios, business units & projects
  • Maintain a list of thought leaders
  • Share templates, important links files, job aids, tips and tricks
  • Provide information on team calls, including agendas and notes
  • Collaborate and discuss

    In this way, several dozen people on this team asynchronously help themselves to training and practical need-to-know basics, and even dynamically adjust how they work.  The wiki reduces or eliminates the need for micromanagement of employee-to-project allocation, and developing individual talent.

    This is a commonly repeated model across many teams in IBM, moving from traditional management meetings and cadence calls to teams that self-manage and self-document their coordination among the their members and roles.

• Another team created their own external community to collaborate among over 200 marketing executives, agency partners, and marketing professionals.  They simplified project management and coordination across multiple partners and IBM contacts.
• A VP of sales described how he saved himself over an hour each week by consolidating the different ways he communicated with his direct reports of sales managers and operations people. They are now expanding this practice to other roles and members of his sales territory.
• A Swiss technical sales manager encouraged his team to construct all their RFP responses using IBM Connections Activities, which allows his team to quickly bring together and train experts for short-term work. Having this information at their fingertips helps them address customer critical situations rapidly, thereby improving customer satisfaction.

• “I've been recommending the BlueIQ lunch and learn sessions to the New2Blue folks - new IBMers right from college, from acquisitions, from other companies, and more. Many of the new IBMers are living in places in the world where there are no IBM locations and few if any other IBMers. They need our help more than anything. By bringing our social computing ways of working to people when they're brand new to IBM, they are more apt to develop the good habits of working in this way. They're also more easily able to network with other IBMers - a great skill to have as a new IBMer.” -- in HR

• “ I have a very specific example that enabled us to support our client. They asked for help with an internal newsletter [which] had to be in Lotus Notes format and look great …; when the newsletter was released, I saw the note from the client CIO saying how good it was. BlueIQ helped us deliver a fine product to our client” -- in Sales

• “I have gained value on so many levels from the BlueIQ (Ambassadors) program! This program has helped me with my journey of changing the way sales does business … to convince sales management that social software really does dramatically impact productivity of all sales rep roles. The ibm.com inside sales mission is focussed on leveraging innovative touch-points. The BlueIQ Ambassadors Community has been an invaluable source of information to help sellers get a better understanding of how they can utilise social media tools to help them become more productive in their own roles but also in providing insight to their own customers on better ways of doing business” -- in Sales operations.

In 2011, the passionate BlueIQ Ambassador community had grown to over 1600 volunteers. They held over 160 different events across all IBM worldwide business units to educate each other and share their passion on how to collaborate. In addition, they have also held 50 community events to meet and interact with each other as well as other IBMers, energizing and reinvigorating their own energy. The fact that they engage in such activities on their own volition, without needing permission or requiring formal direction to do so, describes a high level of passion across this worldwide group.

The degree of active participation in our social collaborative online environment has grown from 11% in 2009 to over 40% of our salesforce in 2011. This represents the highly active users who have grown accustomed to interacting over this online medium on a weekly and monthly basis; on the broader level over 66% of all sales roles are now using this environment. Among the marketing roles across the global organization, similarly active participation has now grown from 9% in 2009 to 35% in 2011. This rise in global participation among the client-facing roles again is a leading indicator of how social business is faring across IBM.

Furthermore, in 2009 based on analysis of our internal social activity metrics, we noticed obvious growth in North America and Western Europe but rather missing activity in where IBM was placing its own efforts: in the growing markets in Asia Pacific and Latin America. We needed to shore up the communities in major countries of China, India, Japan and Australia, and help individuals in those countries become influential in the global IBM social collaboration environment.

We then launched regional efforts in these countries to find local Ambassadors who would be willing to drive participation in their regions and give direct assistance. Through that effort we were able to increase participation from an average of 5% of the population to nearly 35%, a many-fold growth in the community and in individual influencers in these regions.

What we now recognize is that this growth in active participation is one dimension of a degree of maturity in Social Business. To understand the other dimensions, please take a look at the presentation and video in the materials section titled Social Business Maturity Changes How You ____. It gives additional insight on other areas of maturity beyond adoption and program management, such as the maturity of our conversations about the topic itself, the maturity in the qualities and actions, and in value creation.