Enabling enterprise collaboration at J&J

I was glad when IBF asked me to blog this week:  It’s been three weeks since I began my new role as Manager of Portal and Collaboration at Johnson & Johnson, and in that time I’ve been working hard to get a picture of the current environment; evaluating Web sites, IT infrastructure, culture and organizational makeup as I begin to pull together a strategy for driving collaboration across this highly decentralized function.

To begin with some background; J&J recently transformed their Procurement function by realigning the organization. One part of the transformation clustered procurement activity into major categories. In J&J’s highly decentralized and global organization, this means that folks who worry about finding sources for good packaging, for example, can now connect globally and across the J&J family of companies to find better packaging sources – increasing quality and lowering costs.

After realigning the business, the function turned its attention to figuring out how technology and culture could facilitate the global and cross-company collaboration needed to achieve this vision, identifying a new role in the function to help make this happen.

Meanwhile, J&J’s IT organization is in the midst of a shift into the SharePoint environment. SharePoint 2007 sites and migration programs are springing up all around the company.  Some parts of the organization have been using Documentum’s e-Room technology, so e-room migrations are also a hot topic for user groups and teams looking at the new SharePoint platform.

My biggest challenge is to keep focused on the “big picture” while still identifying all the moving pieces involved in a Portal rollout, including identifying how much governance to wrap around our deployment to help guide users into the new space.

For the high level stuff, my approach is to focus on some basic collaboration concepts:

· Create a “2.0” mindset

· Equip the Workforce

· Lead by example

· Grow from the bottom up

This is an approach that has been seen before – many tales of successful collaborative initiatives focus on the “top down, bottom up” approach, while the topic of how to create a “2.0” mindset is all over the collaboration blogosphere. The concepts may be basic, but the details required to achieve each one are more complex.

So, after identifying these concepts, I zoomed in on the immediate challenge of deploying a new Portal, identifying on capabilities that will facilitate or enable collaboration in the Portal environment. A lot of these are no-brainers, but I found it useful to create a sort of “checklist” of collaboration features to help remind us of our goal, especially as we can easily get sidetracked by the minutia of more traditional site migration and management activities:

Portal features for enabling collaboration
Presence: Creating a sense of “people there” in an online space can be accomplished in a few ways:

1. Real time presence through chat/awareness indicators

2.  Pictures and profiles of real employees in the community

3. Names and contact information on pages and documents - who to contact about this information, for more info, etc.

a. Organizational charts with pictures and profiles connected

Communication:  Collaboration can happen when traditional communications channels are enhanced:

1. Allowing 2 and multi-way communication among employees and between employees and leaders through discussion boards, blogs, Q&As.

2. Multimedia: Providing video and audio communications for key messages and meetings. Also providing traditional material (any document, training, etc.) in downloadable formats for iPods or other mobile media device.

3.  Live polls and surveys: Keeping an active pulse on the community and providing a draw for return visits.

4. Use of Wikis to empower employees to be active communicators on the Portal - not just “listeners”

Enabling work: The Portal can offer active, useful spaces for managing projects, programs and events as an integrated part of the online space. This is the promise of Sharepoint - integrating a “traditional” filing cabinet web site approach with spaces that enable day-to-day interaction, document store, tasks, schedules, events, email.

2.0 and Social networking:  Here we look at technologies that provide a lens for the collective activity of the community. Examples include:

1. Ranking and rating and “like minded” tools (“People who liked/used/saw this, also did this)

2. Share tagging/folksonomies (i.e. del.icio.us)

3. People who know people

In a few weeks I'll blog more about how I'm forming a multi-faceted collaboration approach that goes beyond the Portal to facilitate collaboration and drive culture change throughout this organization.