ABB Reinvents Its Intranet with Social Networking Technology
A leader in power and automation technologies, ABB supplies power grids, industrial motors, drives and generators for industrial, commercial and utility operations.
In 2012, ABB decided its corporate intranet wasn’t meeting the company’s need for a comprehensive platform that would connect and empower its widespread international workforce. The intranet’s content-management system was more than a decade old and out of date. It had poor search functionality and information was often added instead of changed, resulting in different versions of the same content. Adding to the confusion and inefficiency was the fact that the intranet was just one of many places where people stored information, including local file servers, wikis and other knowledge platforms.
ABB decided to replace that outmoded intranet with a powerful, socially-enabled one that the company calls Inside+. Instead of a static intranet with outdated content, Inside+ serves as ABB’s “enterprise front door,” providing staff with an entry point to all the information and tools that they need to do their jobs, including the Microsoft Office 365 suite and current company news. By late 2014, Inside+ was being used by 30,000 people per day, and the results have been impressive. “Instead of 20 different tools, we have
one integrated solution that does it all,” says Group Vice President and Head of Digital Communications Mark Seall. “Inside+ gives our people everything they need to work as efficiently as possible.”
All of the company’s key internal platforms are integrated into Inside+, with individualized Yammer feeds occupying the left half of the landing page. “My Yammer feed shows me emails, updates to documents I’ve been working on–everything I need to do my job,” Seall explains. Other core Office 365 applications are only a click or two away. “For instance, Microsoft SharePoint is an important part of most people’s work day, and they can access it from their Inside+ toolbar,” he adds. SharePoint isn’t just easy to get to, it’s part of the intranet’s internal search, ensuring that documents people are collaborating on don’t get lost in the shuffle.
Connecting–and Listening to–Staff All Over the Globe
“Organizations are made of people, and much of the success of an organization rests on the knowledge in people’s heads and how they make use of it,” Seall says. “Therefore an intranet should not only connect people with content, but with other people. Yammer does that for us. You can get answers, even when you don’t know who to ask. Just put your question out, and the experts will find you.”
Using Yammer as a platform for listening is paying off in other ways at ABB. For instance, instead of flying roughly 100 employees to its Zurich headquarters for an annual communications conference, the company ran the conference virtually in 2012 and 2013, with all discussion housed and archived on Yammer. The engagement was impressive: during one 24-hour period, more than 4,500 posts went up.
Adapting to Challenges and Sharing Success
As ABB personnel increasingly embrace the fluid discussion that Yammer enables, email has been reduced. For instance, Seall estimates that his team’s inboxes have shrunk by 50 percent. “Even better, moving conversations from email to Yammer makes discussions more productive,” he says. “We have seen an increase in both engagement and effectiveness.”
Another thing that makes ABB staff more productive is anywhere, anytime access to Inside+ and Office 365. People tap in on smartphones and tablets when they’re home, on the road, or on the factory floor. “We find that more than half of the comments people are posting come in from mobile devices,” Seall reports.
Growing into Socially Enabled Success
In keeping with its brand, “Power and productivity for a better world,” ABB is leveraging the power of social networking to boost productivity for a better enterprise. “This is an inevitable change and organizations are going to have to work like this in the future,” Seall says. “The benefits that digital collaboration offers to enterprises like ABB are massive. Our intranet is the first step toward fully leveraging this value, enabling the organization to work as a network.”