Here's the latest post in our series of interviews with the speakers for our inaugural
Social Business Virtual Conference which is being held completely online this September 8, 2011.
I asked
Claire Flanagan, Director, Social Business Strategy at CSC, to share some thoughts about her presentation with us.
What are you going to speak about at the Social Business virtual conference Sept 8th?
I will be describing CSC's social business strategy development and implementation over the last several years as we went from a number of disparate collaboration projects to a comprehensive strategic deployment to more than 94,000 registered users.
Do you have any examples of implementations or case studies?
This presentation really is a case study of how CSC built and implemented its social business strategy and used it to develop its collaboration platform and supporting processes. Yet within our single deployment we saw a number of use cases being met with this deployment. I'll share a few of our early use case successes that lead to our global, viral success.
What will the attendees learn from your presentation?
We're a very large, geographically dispersed organization - more than 94,000 employees in 90 countries - and so we have many of the same challenges as other large organizations. I will describe some of those challenges and how we addressed them with some specific examples around executive sponsorship, metrics, and engagement.
Also, attendees will walk away with concrete ideas for their own business and transformation change strategy. I firmly believe that even if you do your homework well and select the best tool in the marketplace, your project can still fail if you don't plan for the people, or the organization change required. These are not just IT projects, these tools are about people. At CSC we believed that while you can't plan to go viral, you can't go viral if you don't plan well. So I'll share some very specific do's and don'ts that attendees can apply immediately to their organization change plans.
How have you seen social business impact your job/organization for the better? Industry?
Social business processes and technologies are not "the next big thing" - they are here now. Organizations including CSC are getting concrete benefits from their implementation. And these benefits are often financial - whether it's from reducing travel costs associated with meeting with geographically separated clients and colleagues, reducing the time to market, or reducing the effort required to respond to a proposal. For CSC, social business is not an extra step - it's become part of our workflow enabling every aspect of our business from solution innovation, business development, peer support to customer delivery.
It's also helped to overcome organizational barriers - in some cases explicit, in others tacit - which makes it easier and faster to get the right answer or find the right resource. That's harder to put a price on but it's no less a benefit - just ask anyone who's searched their intranet or Google for hours looking for a solution for a quirky problem.
What do you expect or what would you like to see next in the adoption for social business tools or practices?
CSC is actively expanding our social business strategy beyond our firewall. We are using a solution that will allow us to bridge across communities. I think there's more potential in this space for frictionless movement of conversations and content across a company's eco-system of communities with customers, employees and other third parties. I think solutions are only now scratching the surface of what's possible.
What are you looking forward to the most about presenting for our virtual event?
I'm excited to be part of AIIM's virtual event. You've got an incredible line up of speakers and topics. I'm honored to be asked to speak, but I'm also looking forward to listening and learning from my colleagues as well.
Sneak Peek at other Social Business Virtual Conference speakers' sessions:
Please join Claire for her presentation and Q&A immediately following on September 8, 2011 at 12:00 pm Eastern Time.
#AIIM #enterprise2.0 #SocialBusiness #web2.0