Damco People Network
At Damco, we launched our internal social business network called, Damco People Network, last week. This platform enables our people to Connect, Communicate and Collaborate across our global, networked business.
Platform
The Damco People Network was developed in around 4 months leveraging Jive SBS platform and is hosted as a Software as a Service (Saas) by Jive. We have skinned the environment with Damco branding and enabled some of the more enhanced functionality to provide a dynamic 'home' page and for example allow staff to install Jive plug-ins for MS Office and Outlook. These plug-ins enable users to share documents on the platform and promote email conversations to the network. The platform is available through a normal browser and can be accessed with iOS, Android and BlackBerry mobile devices as well. This is under full security and these devices need to be authenticated prior to granting access. The platform will integrate with our SharePoint document repository and ultimately our Active Directory for user authentication.
Purpose
Gartner and other experts in the social business networking space recommend to define the purpose of one's social network initiative very clearly upfront so that clear direction can be given to the development of the platform and its subsequent usage. We defined our purpose as to enable our staff across the globe to easily and effectively connect, communicate and collaborate with each other and within existing and newly established communities. This purpose was facilitated from the start by ensuring that the platform would not become a full reflection of our standing organization structure, but rather would be driven by areas of collaboration. In our industry, collaboration areas are customer teams, trade lanes, functions, projects, locations, and so on. Prior to the launch of the platform, we established a number of communities for existing projects, customers and locations to showcase how the platform should be used.
Launch
The platform was launched during our Leadership Conference where our Top 150 leaders gather. As part of the launch, these leaders were requested to sign up, establish their profile and invite their teams to do the same during the next week. This has resulted in around 2000 users signing up to the new platform during the first week. An interesting observation is that already a broad representation of our people has joined the network, so not only the leaders that were specifically addressed during the leadership conference. It is also very encouraging to see the value added discussions and collaboration already taking place after the first week.
Benefits
We expect that the use of this platform will enhance the sharing of information and collaboration within our organization. The network has the functionality to provide users with relevant information and suggest connections based on their activities and content on the platform. This makes it relevant for the users and drives further activity.
The platform will also enable us to leverage tacit knowledge, expertise and experience within our organization. As any organization, there is a great knowledge base in our organization which will now be easier accessible by Search, 'Find an Expert', Community Management and Trending Topics / People.
We expect to drive some traffic away from email as collaboration on shared documents, meetings and general initiatives is much easier and inclusive when done on the social business network.
So, we are very excited to have embarked on our journey with the social business network and are confident that this will enable closer and more effective collaboration.
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