Testing the Business Value of Social Networking in the Enterprise

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

We have officially completed our exploration process to determine the value of social networking within our enterprise. This is included conversations with industry analysts; IT peers; a proof-of-concept (POC); usage model work; focus groups and human factors engineering. The first lesson we learned is to not call it “social” networking. It was wrought with images of kids throwing virtual pies at each other. Our new terminology for the capability within the enterprise is now Professional Networking.

We took a look at professional networking’ s ability to solve some key challenges for Intel and tested a short list of vendor platforms to determine which one, if any, could meet our requirements. Below are some key findings and conclusions.

Employees see a significant ability to tackle increasing feelings of isolation and difficulty finding knowledge.
In particular, POC participants noted the ability to put a face to a name; extend and create their network; and locate experts as valuable features. As one participant stated, “Providing people better ways to connect, and find that knowledge from experts, would really help with silo’d information and make Intel feel more productive.”

There is substantial value in improving the attraction & retention of the next generation workforce.
Professional networking is expected by the next generation workforce. See What Gen Y Teaches Us About Enterprise Social Networking for learnings from focus group conversations with recent college graduates. Intel has opportunities to deliver expected new ways to learn, interact and access information immediately. This is not a trend, it is reality.

What Strategies are Critical for Success?
In addition to exploring the business value of professional networking, we learned a lot about what strategies are critical for success and what key road blocks need to be removed. What are the most critical strategies surrounding the deployment of professional networking?

Professional networking must bolt into an integrated social collaboration framework.
The strength of professional networking doesn’t just lie with the people information in the tool, but with the added context that other tools bring. For example, my profile lets people know that I am the Enterprise Social Media Program Manager but doesn’t present any documents, blogs, wikis or discussions forums to discover my “knowledge” around social media. A robust social stack provides the full rich picture.

Integration across social tools and traditional collaborative tools such as email, meeting workspaces and instant messaging is critical.
We heard loud and clear that the professional networking application should not be a disparate application. At a minimum, it must be integrated across social tools such as blogs, forums and wikis. Additionally, it needs to be engrained in work flow processes. This means that it is integrated into internal white pages; enterprise search results; email v-card, presence, to name a few.

Employees want only one profile to maintain; it must be unified.
If time is dedicated to update and enrich a profile, employees want only one. In addition, employees want to be able to leverage the profiles to search and find experts. In a survey done by our Enterprise Search program team, finding people was the third most important search employees want to do.

Deploying professional networking successfully is not as easy at it sounds. See The Best Social Tools Don’t Make a Social Enterprise, which highlights some of the key challenges. In a nut shell, if IT doesn’t act, business units will. Also, if a strong investment in enterprise social computing has lacked, then the success of professional networking will be at risk without a solid core social stack. The core stack brings to the forefront the information and knowledge associated with the people.

Our goal is to have professional networking deployed by the end of the year. However, we still have a bit of work to be done.

I would love to hear how your company is approaching professional networking. Are you finding the same business value, challenges and strategies necessary for success?

. via

Tags: Pakistan News
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Intel Health Guide receives FDA clearance

Saturday, July 12th, 2008

Yesterday, Intel released this announcement on the Digital Health “Intel Health Guide” product and it’s clearance by the FDA. This looks to be a very exciting device that will go a long way in applying technology to provide a more personal, human healthcare experience while maintaining care quality.

Working in IT, I have not always had good visibility into the business of Intel. In IT, we talk about “customers” which refers to Intel employees using IT services, not Intel customers who buy and use Intel’s products.

However, as a program/project manager in the IT Mergers and Acquisitions team, I am gaining unique insights into how Intel builds products by engaging with customers and understanding needs, not just short term but potentially very long term.

For example, Intel recently acquired a company called WebVMC. While working with the Digital Health and WebVMC folks on the IT integration of that acquisition, I’ve gained new insights into the direction Intel is going with its businesses around Digital Health.

I’m looking forward to future projects that will help me as an IT solutions provider truly understand the business aspects involved so that the solutions I build and deploy help meet those business objectives. Because at the end of the day, it’s not about cool IT technology (as much as we might like it to be), it’s about our customers and making a difference in their lives…and how especially true in the field of healthcare.

Great work, Digital Health team!

. via

Tags: Pakistan News
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Fortune Cookie Security Advice - June 2008

Monday, June 30th, 2008

Everyone wants information security to be easy. Wouldn’t it be nice if it were simple enough to fit snugly inside a fortune cookie? Well, although I don’t try to promote such foolish nonsense, I do on occasion pass on readily digestible nuggets to reinforce security principles and get people thinking how security applies to their environment.

Common Sense
I think the key to fortune cookie advice is ‘common sense’ in the context of security. It must be simple, succinct, and make sense to everyone, while conveying important security aspects.

Here is my Fortune Cookie advice for June:

A perfect security program does not make your environment invincible! It would be astronomically too expensive. The ‘perfect’ security program achieves the optimal balance of spending, loss prevented, and acceptable losses (residual loss).

Now if I can just figure out how to stuff these little cookies…

Am I contributing to the problem of over simplifying security? Or am I reaching out to those who might not take an inordinate amount of time necessary to understand the complexities and nuances of our industry? You decide and feel free to share your knowledge-nuggets.

Fortune Cookie Security Advice - May 2008

. via

Tags: Pakistan News
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

How do you measure data quality in your Application Inventory?

Friday, June 20th, 2008

It is vitally important to give data consumers an indicator of the quality of your information. This helps to build a trust in the completeness and review state related to what they are consuming. What we have implemented is real-time, includes embedded business rules and a pretty little display.

So what did we do?

• Created a Five tiered rating system Data Quality(DQ) State
• Moving through each tier means that data completeness and audited quality checks are performed
• As the software application moves through its life cycle, additional data elements become mandatory, which effects the dynamically calculated rating
• DQ State value exposed for interfaced consumption
• Shown on-screen with graphical representation

What is involved in each DQ State tier level?

• DQ State 0: does not meet minimum required data
• DQ State 1: Name, Business Description, Status, Manufacturer, Owner (Group/Contact)
• DQ State 2: State 1 plus - Host, Software Type, User (count/location), Data Classification, Technology categories
• DQ State 3: State 2 plus - Cost Assessment
• DQ State 4: State 3 plus - Capability categories, Network communication details, Business Continuity details

This tiered approach begins to define higher quality for the data completeness as it moves up the defined levels. Not only having the blanks filled in, but the application of embedded business rules-based analysis to validate content, drives the state calculation. These are updated based on any change to any of the evaluated content.

What do you do in your organization? How do you ensure that the data “freshness” is preserved?

Previous topics include Application inventory, what do you capture?, Application inventory starts with a definition, Application inventory as a cost savings initiative and Application Inventory, the start of data sustainability?.

. via

Tags: Pakistan News
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

“Quiet Time” and “No Email Day” pilot data is in!

Sunday, June 15th, 2008

Since the previous post in October there has been much interest in our two pilots aiming to reduce information overload; and I’ve responded to all of them with the quintessential engineering attitude of “we’ll have to wait until the data is in”. Well, the data is finally in, and now I can reward your patience and share the main points.

You will recall we were running two pilots:

1. “Quiet Time” on Tuesday morning.

In this experiment 300 engineers and managers, located in two US sites (Austin, TX and Chandler, AZ), agreed to minimize interruptions and distractions every Tuesday morning. During these periods they had all set their email and IM clients to “offline”, forwarded their phones to voice mail, avoided setting up meetings, and isolated themselves from “visitors” by putting up a “Do not disturb” sign at their doorway. The purpose was to see the effect of 4 hours of contiguous “thinking time”.

On the whole, the 7-month pilot returned markedly positive results. It has been successful in improving employee effectiveness, efficiency and quality of life for numerous employees in diverse job roles. 45% of post-pilot survey respondents had found it effective as is, and 71% recommended we consider extending it to other groups, possibly after applying some modifications.

As expected, this is not a matter where “one size fits all”: not all people found this a desirable practice, depending also on their specific job roles. But an interesting finding is that Quiet Time is useful to different people for different reasons. Some people need it to concentrate on creative tasks, as we had predicted, but even people whose work involves ongoing interaction with others found the periodic “breathing space” beneficial in restoring balance and getting back in control of an otherwise hectic work routine. One should, we learned, let each person decide how to use the quiet hours to best effect. A key success factor, however, is that people must realize that the “quiet” requirement is not absolute; when an urgent situations requires it, interruptions are permitted. Communicating this clearly was necessary halfway through the pilot.

2. “No Email Day” on the Friday.

It has been noted (and often ignored) that “No Email Day”, or “Zero Email Friday”, is a misnomer; but it has caught widely before we got to it and we kept the name. In reality, email is not forbidden on the Friday; the idea is to solve the problem where people send email to a coworker in the next cubicle rather than walk across the aisle and talk, by encouraging the use of face to face and telephone conversation in preference to email within an organic group, which in our case comprised 150 engineers and managers.

This pilot has achieved lower success than “Quiet Time”, though 29% of respondents did find it effective, and 60% recommended we consider extending it to other groups. The issue, we found, is that there was a clear incompatibility of NED with the nature of work in the chosen pilot group, where many people are routinely away from their desks or in meetings much of the time. This renders asynchronous email the method of choice for connecting to people in the group. It is easy to conjecture that for NED to work better, it should be applied in teams that are not only collocated, but also tend to sit in their offices most of the day, so your coworker is predictably available to be spoken to synchronously when the need arises.

Our next steps will be to present these data to management and consider proliferation to other groups at Intel who might find either or both practices useful in the context of their work style.

. via

Tags: Pakistan News
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »