Lotus Connections Drives Innovative Product Development at Global Diversified Technology Company

Customer Information Global Diversified Technology Company 65,000 employees Worldwide presence in these markets: Consumer and office Display and graphics Electro and communications Healthcare Industrial and transportation Safety, security and protection services

Customer Challenges Inability for individuals to find each other and the information they need to collaborate, innovate, and meet business objectives Existing communities of practice are not visible to the larger organization; they become stagnant and unable to attract potential new members, thus impeding innovation It is difficult for new, inexperienced professionals to find the organization’s “wisdom holders” in order to learn from them before they retire Challenge: Within this extremely diversified and geographically dispersed organization, finding the right people and information in order to accomplish work is a substantial challenge. The search is made more difficult by constantly changing roles, the addition of new colleagues through mergers and acquisitions, and the ever increasing specialization of skillsets. And, even when the right people are found, a lack of social capital makes it difficult to engage them in your work. Additionally, existing communities of practice grow stagnant because they are not visible to the larger organization, and do not attract new members. This reduces the innovative “accidents” that could occur from new members’ fresh perspectives on current projects. Finally, new and inexperienced professionals cannot find and form trusted working relationships with the “wisdom holders” in the organization, in order to learn from them before they retire.

Solution: Unified Employee Workplace Goal: Provide highly integrated team collaboration and social computing tools and templates that make it easy for individuals to find the right people and information Unified Workplace Collaboration Community Tools: Self Service Portal Team and Social Computing Place Services Real-time Services Content, Self-service Administration Employee Profiles Blogs Social Bookmarking Communities Enterprise tagging Activities Forums Wikis Teamrooms Instant messaging Web conference Aggregrated content syndication Personalized Feeds Metrics Notification services Solution: Through the use of Lotus Connections, Lotus Sametime, Lotus Domino, Lotus QuickPlace, and other tools, all delivered through a browser experience, the organization plans to enable individuals to create personalized subscriptions to people, team places, and various content repositories. These subscriptions can be based on a particular topic or interest, and saved for reuse. The individual will have a unified user experience across all of these resources, enabling them to find the right person or information, within context, when needed. Also, Unified Workplace will enable individuals to discover and create communities of interest, thereby forming new and deeper working relationships with colleagues across the globe and across organizational boundaries. It will also enable informal capture and sharing of knowledge among skilled and unskilled employees.

Business Value Work is accomplished with the best people and information Communities thrive and grow with new members and new ideas that lead to innovation New, inexperienced professionals find the organization’s “wisdom holders” and learn from them before they retire Benefits: The company plans to implement Unified Workplace into pilot in 2007. The following benefits are expected. Work is accomplished with the best people and information Communities thrive and grow with new members and new ideas that lead to innovation New, inexperienced professionals find the organization’s “wisdom holders” and learn from them before they retire