These tools will not work everywhere, however. Riemer says if an organisation has a culture that is highly competitive internally, it is unlikely that workers will ever share information and collaborate.
For the outsource salary package management company Smartsalary, use of Salesforce.com’s Chatter collaboration tool has followed a similarly viral and serendipitous path. Smartsalary’s chief commercial officer Dave Adler says use of Chatter started when Salesforce.com Sales Cloud was implemented for 30 staff in the company’s leasing business in 2010.
The company immediately noticed an improvement in the team’s efficiency.
“The leasing team started using Chatter within their own group to update each other on new cars that were coming to market, or changes to employee policies or processes,” Adler says.
Later that year Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud was deployed in the company’s call centre, extending the footprint of Chatter, and today it is available across the business.
Adler says there was never any formal rollout program, nor any formal training.
“We said, ‘Let’s see what happens and how people interact with it’. And it is effectively becoming the main way people communicate within the business, replacing a lot of our internal email.
“People are used to Facebook and are used to social tools, and Chatter is really a corporate type of Facebook.”
While the company is yet to conduct any formal analysis of the benefits that Chatter has delivered, Adler is satisfied that it is meeting goals of improving information flow and breaking down silos within the organisation.
“And you can start seeing who is generating ideas, and generating followers and influencing stuff,” Adler says. “And it is not intimidating. We are seeing more people doing things they would normally not.”
It is effectively becoming the main way people communicate within the business, replacing a lot of our internal email
But it is not just the enterprise social tools that can benefit from a viral deployment strategy. At Medibank the deployment of Citrix’s enterprise collaboration suite to assist in the remote training of nurses in its Health Solutions business back in 2008 has now spread across the organisation to cover more than 400 users.
“I had already started looking at collaboration tools, but in this instance we were looking at flying some nurses from Christchurch up to Wellington for a couple of weeks for training,” says technology services manager Dave Buckmaster.
“I identified that the cost savings in implementing a collaboration tool to enable some of the training to take place remotely would provide the return on investment that we needed to bring a new product in.
“It has grown from there to now being used across Medibank and other lines of business.”
Today Citrix is used across the organisation, including senior leaders, often to eliminate travel. Buckmaster says HR is investigating its use as a recruitment tool for candidates who cannot easily get to the company’s offices.
“Because I only had limited licences I purposely didn’t make a big announcement about it. And it just literally proliferated through word of mouth,” he says.
Buckmaster believes this approach has been successful because the use and benefit of these tools is often not best appreciated until users see them for themselves.
“We’ve had people who have been sceptical about it until they have used it, but we have never forced the product on anyone,” Buckmaster says. “But the sceptics have always been won over. Ultimately we will be looking at how we can make tools such as this available to everyone, because we do see the value in it.”
Perhaps it is fitting that these social tools are being adopted via a highly social process of peer-to-peer recommendation. At NAB, Terry says the use of social collaboration has also assisted in helping staff become more engaged by enabling them to share more of their life in a social context. Even so, he says that 95 per cent of conversations relate to work – something that he rates as better than what happens around the proverbial water cooler.
“The future of work is going to be more social,” Terry says. “We have already made significant investments in our external social media, so it is a natural alignment to say this sort of internal social capability is going to drive improved collaboration and a better experience for our people internally, and a better experience for our customers externally.
“We see this becoming part of the fabric of the future of work, and the more we can make our people social internally, the more these things will deliver for our shareholders.”
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