Building global collaboration with a new social network at Ericsson
As internal social networks go, Ericsson says MyNET is up there with the best. Andreas Rådlund and Christine Cornelius tell us about the work that went into ensuring the new platform would be a companywide hit and encourage employee collaboration around the world.
Read this and you will learn
- Steps to successfully set up your own internal social networking platform
At Ericsson, we have 98,000-plus employees spread across 180 different countries, so it's paramount that we're constantly improving communication between different functions. Additionally, as a company that specializes in mobile technology and networks, natural evolution decrees that we're going to seek out more advanced ways of helping our workforce coordinate projects, explore ways of working together and get to know their colleagues across the globe.
Ericsson in numbers
98,000 employees
SEK 203.3 billion revenue in 2010
Doing business in 180 countries
45,000+ unique MyNET users since launch in Nov 2010
120-150 microblogs per day
1,500+ unique daily users
As an international company where about 95 percent of business is conducted outside of Sweden (the location of our headquarters), we need to ensure our employees have their fingers on the pulse of what's going on worldwide. It's also vital to effectively build on previous experiences from other markets, which has traditionally been done through firm processes and knowledge management.
However, not everything can be captured explicitly, so there's also a strong need for increasing the more tacit knowledge exchange between people, regardless of role/function, organization or location. At the same time, we also wanted to increase the interaction between people - to put it simply we wanted to "make the big company small".
We wanted to break down the global barriers for knowledge sharing by creating one global conversation that anyone could tap into. We also wanted to broaden our employee's knowledge by making it possible to informally connect and follow experts in different areas. Through having one global conversation, we can leverage different perspectives that enhance innovation, but can also help us to respond to customer demands quicker and more accurately.
We wanted to create one global conversation that anyone could tap into.
We wanted to think about things holistically, too. There is an intrinsic human need for communication and also the need for finding competencies that will help you in your job. You should know who to turn to for advice, regardless of whether it's the person next to you in the office or someone in an entirely different time zone. That's the way we can really leverage our global expertise on a local basis.
However, it wasn't as if we didn't have online communities before - we'd been using them internally for years through channels including internal blogs, team collaboration sites, Ericsson project sites, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and, most recently, Yammer. So this hadn't been a recent development.
The main area where online communities had grown was Yammer. People had started to communicate on their own, created different groups and took ownership of it.
The number of employees using Yammer grew quite quickly. In practice we were seeing exactly the kind of behavior we wanted taking place among thousands of employees across the company - people sharing and collaborating regardless of role, organization or location. However, from a security perspective, we faced increased concerns of the limitations an open network possessed, with regard to internal conversations taking place outside of our governance. Several alternatives were evaluated and, bearing in mind all the factors above and the fact that Ericsson is an engineer-driven company that has lots of people who are good at finding their way around technology, we made the decision to establish our own social network platform called "MyNET". It was also critical for us that the chosen platform fitted our IT strategy - given that we expected the concept of social networking to be embedded in several applications going forward.
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This article was originally published in Strategic Communication Management.
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