"Knowledge Creation and Social Collaboration in the Digital Workplace" published on http://www.business2community.com/strategy/knowledge-creation-social-collaboration-digital-workplace-0646313

1. KNOWLEDGE CREATION AND
SOCIAL COLLABORATION
IN THE DIGITAL WORKPLACE
ALCATEL-LUCENT’S ENGAGE PLATFORM
CASE STUDY

2. TABLE OF CONTENTS
Riding the Knowledge Spiral / 3
Communities Come to the Rescue / 4
The Benefits of (Social) Collaboration / 5
Alcatel-Lucent In-house Experience / 6
Towards the Digital Workplace / 8
References / 9
About the Author / 9

3. “The only irreplaceable capital an organization possesses is
the knowledge and ability of its people. The productivity of
that capital depends on how effectively people share their
competence with those who can use it.”
Andrew Carnegie, 1919
The creation of a digital workplace, through the introduction of state-of-the-art ICT
technology and new ways of working (NWOW), puts a clear focus on streamlining incompany communication, improving organizational performance, and increasing the overall
satisfaction of employees.
In today’s business environment, remote working and collaboration are considered keys to
success for organizations of all size. Particularly in enterprises that employ many
knowledge workers, introduction of new technology may lead to higher productivity and to
a positive change in the company culture.
In 2010, Alcatel-Lucent launched Engage, a social collaboration platform that has become a
cornerstone of the company’s global Digital Workplace. With over 70,000 users and more
than 4,000 formal and informal communities, Engage facilitates worldwide employee
communication and collaboration.
RIDING THE KNOWLEDGE SPIRAL
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) already described two kinds of knowledge: “a subject we
know ourselves, or one we know where we can find information upon.” This premise that
there are two types of knowledge is also one of the fundamentals of Japanese professor
Ikujiro Nonaka’s knowledge spiral [1].
Figure 1. Knowledge creation is a cyclic process (Nonaka’s spiral)
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4. Explicit knowledge is the objective, factual and rational knowledge that can be expressed
in words, numbers and formulas – and, consequently, that can be easily stored in and
retrieved from databases and traditional content management systems (CMS).
But in each organization there is also a massive amount of so called tacit knowledge, the
subjective and experience based (and often also context-based) knowledge that is stored in
people’s minds and memory. Tacit knowledge may also include mental models, cognitive
skills and technical skills, such as know-how and how-to.
Information can be converted into knowledge, and each type of knowledge can be converted
into the other one: tacit knowledge can be made explicit (externalized), and explicit
knowledge may be absorbed (internalized) into new tacit knowledge. Nonaka models
these handovers into a spiral, as they fuel a continuous learning process within a company
or an organization.
COMMUNITIES COME TO THE RESCUE
Knowledge is an extremely valuable asset for any company, and needs to be cultivated and
re-used rather than just collected and stored. Companies need to consider “knowledge
work” as part of their employees’ normal activities –rather than capturing knowledge
through a separate organization– and create community structures to create, raise and
nurture the knowledge spiral (Figure 2).
Figure 2. How communities power Nonaka’s spiral
Within an enterprise environment, communities can be defined as networks of individuals
with common problems or interests that ‘get together’ (either physically or virtually) and
collaborate to identify common solutions, explore new ways of working, and share good
practices and ideas. Rather than bringing knowledge into an organization (that’s what
training is for), communities help to grow (cross-organizational) knowledge that can be
applied in day-to-day business.
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5. Communities may be formal (also called Communities of Practice or COPs) or informal
(often referred to as Communities of Interest of COIs). Formal communities mainly deal
with explicit knowledge and often align with organizations, projects or activities. They are a
means to bring domain specialists with different skills together, e.g. engineers and
marketers dealing with the same product portfolio.
Informal communities host individuals that share a common interest or passion – which
may be either work-related or non-work-related. COI members typically belong to different
parts of the organization, may know little about each other, and have no other common
interests outside of this area. Work-related COIs may e.g. be looking for disruptive
innovation ideas, while other groups may deal with more casual topics like language
learning or photography.
Both COPs and COIs are instrumental to activating and fueling Nonaka’s spiral. Formal
communities are mainly contributing to adoption and application of explicit knowledge,
while informal communities socialize and externalize tacit knowledge.
THE BENEFITS OF (SOCIAL) COLLABORATION
With an unprecedented digital data storm raging through the business world, knowledge
workers may spend up to 30% of their working day looking for people and relevant
information to do their job. A waste of precious time and human resources that can be
dramatically reduced by providing employees with appropriate structures, practices and
ICT technology —putting mobility, collaboration and knowledge sharing on the foreplan.
When an organization has a clear purpose, collaborative tools can help incubate and
develop healthy, knowledge-sharing communities. This makes investing in applications like
videoconferencing and social collaboration platforms worthwhile. According to research by
Alcatel-Lucent, almost 70% of high-performing companies equip employees with innovative
tools, services, or capabilities. And with an ever-growing mobile workforce, the challenges
in creating collaborative environments will only intensify [2], [3].
With the exponential growth of consumer social networks like Facebook and Twitter, social
technologies are making their entry into the enterprise environment too, as they unleash
new models for in-company communication and collaboration (Figure 3.)
A recent survey by Avanade [4] revealed that the majority of large companies are still
leveraging consumer-driven social networking technologies. Many decision-makers,
however, plan to adopt true enterprise social collaboration tools like Yammer, Jive,
SharePoint or Salesforce Chatter in the near future.
Social technologies promise to unlock value in major sectors of the economy and across a
range of functional areas. Particularly in those companies that are heavily relying on
knowledge. Most commonly cited measurable results of social collaboration are speed to
access knowledge and experts, and reduction of communication and travel costs [5] . More
qualitative benefits can be found in the domain of HRM (employee retention,
empowerment, and engagement) and business culture (information sharing, better
communication, and cross-organization collaboration).
A 2012 McKinsey study reveals that social technologies could actually raise productivity of
knowledge workers by 20% to 25% [6], and a Kellogg School of Management case study
reports on a company that has improved its employees ability to find information by 31%,
and to find people who knew the person with information by 71% [7].
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6. Figure 3. Social media unleash new models for in-company communication and collaboration
ALCATEL-LUCENT IN-HOUSE EXPERIENCE
In 2009, Alcatel-Lucent –in the middle of its global transformation program after the 2006
merger of Alcatel and Lucent– ran a project named “Reconnect People” [8]. The objective of
this initiative, in which both HR and IT departments played a role, was to collect
requirements for a new way of working (supported by appropriate IT tools) to:



Help the company move from a “product culture” to a “service culture”;
Better deal with the complexity of a global distributed organization;
Get access to knowledge and content that is locally stored at different locations.
An employee survey pointed out that workers considered communities as a powerful
means to support them in their daily business, and that dedicated collaboration tools
could help them to manage knowledge, locate experts, foster cross-company collaboration,
limit the number of meetings and conference calls, and reduce the use of e-mail. It has to be
noted however that only a mere fraction of respondents thought that those objectives could
be reached with the company’s current ICT tools. Qualitative interviews with a number of
stakeholders throughout the organization finally led to a set of functional requirements as
listed in Figure 4.
A thorough analysis of tools that were already used in-house (SharePoint, DocuShare,
Joomla, proprietary developments), of platforms used by other companies running similar
programs (Schlumberger, IBM, CapGemini, …) and of commercially available solutions
(SamePage, Yammer, …) finally led to the selection of Jive Social Business Software (SBS) as
the platform to host Alcatel-Lucent’s social collaboration environment – baptized “Engage”,
and taglined “connect, collaborate, contribute”.
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7. Towards the end of 2009, an internal trial was set-up, and Engage was beta-launched
globally on April 6th, 2010. Although this beta-launch was targeting a very small audience —
only about a hundred people were invited by an email to join the community— Engage’s
internal popularity spread very fast, and by the time of the platform’s “official” launch in
June, it had already 12,000 registered members on board!
Figure 4. What employees expect from Enterprise 2.0
Up till today, the popularity of the platform has continued to grow, and over 95% of AlcatelLucent employees have a profile on Engage now. Engage facilitates employee
communication and collaboration through more than 4,000 formal and informal
communities. Usage beats the “90-9-1” rule (that is often cited in consumer social media),
with 38% active users, of which 29% participate to community discussions and 8%
contribute with content. These figures are even more impressive when activity is analyzed
on a daily basis: 252 new content items, 4,497 searches, 16,746 views and 49,143
notifications sent to (subscribed) users per day in April 2013.
Figure 5. Launch and adoption of Alcatel-Lucent’s Engage platform
6 April 2010: BETA LAUNCH
100 members
1 community
3,000 members
200 communities
21 June 2010: OFFICIAL LAUNCH
12,000 members
800 communities
April, 2011: AFTER 1 YEAR
52,000 members
3,000 communities
April 2013: AFTER 3 YEARS
74,000 members
4,000 communities
29 April 2010: SOFT LAUNCH
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8. And, even more important, the roll out of Engage has also fulfilled the 2009 “Reconnect
People” requirements: in a survey conducted one year after launch, 71% of Alcatel-Lucent
employees said the new tool made them aware of what was going on in other parts of
business, more than half of them found it easier to find information and expertise, and twothird used the tool to reach out, ask, share, advertize, …
TOWARDS THE DIGITAL WORKPLACE
In the mean time, Engage has become a cornerstone of Alcatel-Lucent employee
collaboration, a proof point of the evolving company culture, and a scholarly example of
Enterprise 2.0 adoption.
Still this is no endpoint. Engage is an important step towards –as well an essential
component of– the company’s Digital Workplace, in which traditional managed intranet,
enterprise Document Management Systems and Wikis, and the new social platform will coexist and work together [10], [11], [12].
Figure 6. Alcatel-Lucent’s digital workplace concept
As such, the introduction of social collaboration through Engage and the creation of AlcatelLucent’s Digital Workplace is a great example of how HR and IT departments in knowledge
companies can work together, and create an environment that supports a new way of
working — with tangible improvements in the areas of in-company communication,
organizational performance, and employee satisfaction.
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9. REFERENCES
[1]
“The Knowledge-Creating Company” by Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi; Oxford University Press,
1995; ISBN: 978-0195092691
[2]
“Transforming Business: Big Data, Mobility, and Globalization” by Allison Cerra, Kevin Easterwood and Jerry
Power; John Wiley & Sons, 2012; ISBN: 978-1-118-51968-4
[3]
“Technology and corporate culture: a combination that can drive bottom line results” by Marc Jadoul,
October 2013
[4]
“Global Survey: Is enterprise social collaboration living up to its promise?” by Avanade inc.; May 2013
[5]
“Evolution of the networked enterprise” by McKinsey & Company, 2013
[6]
“The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies” by the McKinsey Global
Institute; McKinsey & Company, 2012
[7]
“The Coworker Network” based on the research of prof. Paul Leonardi; Kellogg Insight, June 2013
[8]
“Reconnect People - Final Report” by Alcatel-Lucent; Internal document, July 2009
[9]
“Enterprise 2.0 Success: Alcatel-Lucent” by Dion Hinchcliffe; ZDnet blog, January 2012
[10] “Snapshot of the Digital Workplace” by Jane McConnell; netjmc.com blog, February 2011
[11] “Social intranet unlocks knowledge and creates value” by Guy Van Leemput; J. Boye blog, March 2013
[12] “Social collaboration: when knowledge meets community” by Marc Jadoul; June 2013
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marc Jadoul is Strategic Marketing Director, Engage Advocate and a member of the Digital
Workplace Board at Alcatel-Lucent, based in Antwerpen, Belgium.
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