Any organization with more than a few dozen employees will face a dilemma: you want to tap into the collective wisdom of your staff, but the scale of the business and competing priorities (the stuff that pays the bills!) can make collaboration difficult. It is an issue that we have been grappling with here at Transform and across our parent company, the Engine Group.

One way companies try to bring staff together is an intranet and, of course, Engine has one of those. But it exhibits many of the faults of the web 1.0 view of the world: it is organized on corporate lines; it is just a repository of information (the internal phone book, the canteen menu) that doesn’t inter-operate with other systems; publication is centrally managed and controlled; and there’s no opportunity for user interaction. As a result, few people use our intranet.

Compare that to how much they use the Internet to interact with each other and the wider world: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Delicious, blogs, discussion forums and review sites. The number of services and sites through which we can create and share with each other has never been greater - or more powerful. What we need, clearly, is a way to unlock ‘the power of social’ inside the business.

Having come to this conclusion, we set about looking for the right solution for Engine. To empower employees it needed to provide capabilities that seemed natural to use because they help to get the job the done, help people work together and seem like a natural part of the workflow.

Our team looked at a range of products across the market – there is a surprisingly large number of ‘Enterprise 2.0’ offerings! – and identified a short-list that offered best fit with our requirements.  Working prototypes were developed in each to test their real-world usability and user-friendliness.  This led us to a preferred solution, which we will be implementing during the next quarter.

We’re very excited by this. By enabling social collaboration we will help employees build relationships, find answers and share ideas in ways that are familiar and productive. People in separate operating companies within Engine that otherwise might never cross paths will be able to collaborate as if they were sitting right next to each other – something that will become increasingly important as the group grows its international footprint. Breaking down walls for new employees to access existing knowledge and expertise will, we believe, drive learning curves down and results up.  We can increase the speed of integrated work and improve the quality of service we deliver by giving easier access to cross-group resources and helping people locate the expertise we already have in-house.  Ultimately, our ‘social intranet’ will foster more innovative ways of working, which will result in better work for our clients

But, as we know, even the best piece of technology is useless if people don’t engage. At Engine our corporate mantra is ‘love change’, but we should never underestimate how hard it can be. It has been argued that replacement technology must be 10 times better than what it replaces, if there is a chance of it being accepted!  Having found our solution and planned the technical delivery, our biggest challenge may be the bit that comes next: driving adoption.

How we do that and the lessons we’ll learn will be the subject of another blog post – stay tuned!

Photo with thanks to Will Lion @ Flickr