On the corporate intranet, social means better business. Despite the initial executive fears that social media equals ‘goofing around’ on the job, enterprise social media is supporting the business, driving innovation and collaboration, and allowing employees to perform more effectively in their jobs.
Quintiles values innovation and collaboration; as the global pioneer in pharmaceutical services, Quintiles helps deliver new drugs and cures for the world’s most challenging diseases. With more than 27,000 professionals in 62 countries, the need to break down geographic barriers and structural silos is important in delivering an innovative, and collaborative intranet environment. As such, Quintiles looked to create a social intranet – utilizing multiple technologies, including SharePoint and social media technologies – to deliver an award winning intranet.
“iQ, Quintiles Intranet, has helped employees to connect with each and become more engaged with different parts of the company,” Laura A. Grover, Sr. Digital Strategy Director. “Employees can follow colleagues regardless of reporting structure, role or location. They can subscribe to departments or other office locations that are of interest to them to get news and updates based on what employees are posting.”
LEARN MORE ABOUT THE QUINTILES INTRANET AT THE INTRANET GLOBAL FORUM OCT. 10 & 11
The new social intranet comes with all the social bells and whistles:
• Personal spaces; profiles
• Wikis
• Blogs
• Micro-blogging (ala Twitter)
• Desktop, tablet, and mobile access
• Content targeting
iQ also features most of the standard or requisite features of a robust, enterprise intranet:
• Web content management and publishing
• Document management
• Collaborative workspaces
• Structured content
• Security
• Search
• Integration with other systems
• Taxonomy
Too many organizations simply use SharePoint or Websphere because it is in their eyes the easy choice and defacto standard instead of examining the cost benefit and business benefit of different technologies. Quintiles has opted for the intelligent path; rather than be sold the easy choice, the iQ team worked diligently at investigating many technologies, and invested in multiple technologies to power the complete intranet– a whole raft of solutions that work together to produce a comprehensive, social intranet experience including:
• Adobe Contributor CQ5 (CMS)
• DotNetNuke (Both)
• Drupal (CMS)
• Ektron (Both)
• IBM (Both)
• Joomla (CMS)
• Microsoft SharePoint (Both)
• OpenText Web Content Management (Both)
• Oracle Web Center (Portal)
• SiteCore (Both)
• WordPress (Both)
The results from social enterprise studies have been impressive: According to Harvard Business Review’s report titled, Social Media’s Productivity Payoff, (HBR.org, August 21, 2012) it is estimated that social media is “reducing ‘information finding’ activities (e.g. email and online search) by 20-25% on average, per employee.” The HBR report continues, “We estimate that “interaction workers,” (managers, professionals, sales people, and others) spend 28% of their workdays answering, writing, or responding to email. They also spend another 19% of the time trying to track down information (including searching through their own e-mail files) and 14% collaborating with co-workers.”
Surprisingly, while most organizations are slow to adopt corporate blogging, intranet blogging has become an instant hit at Quintiles: during the first half of 2012 alone, Quintiles staff posted 700 blogs, garnering 63,000 blog views. “When we expanded the visibility of our bloggers to the home page, more employees began to write and view blogs,” espouses Grover. “Topics range from business performance to anecdotes about vacations to history.”
“One of the most startling outcomes of the power of blogs came in January during our Global Leadership Meeting. Several of the most senior executives were blogging about the meeting, our 2011 results, and their experience in India, where the meeting was held.”
Wikis have also begun to grow due to the careful, social gardening of the intranet team (iQ owned and governed by the Digital Communications group; although the greater team includes 350 trained publishers, above and beyond the average social poster): there are about 80 collaboration areas where wikis are available. “Our HR team is posting ideas for helping Work-life balance in twelve attribute areas,” adds Grover. “Everyone can see and share their ideas as well as benefit from the links posted.”
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Learn more about the Quintiles social intranet, and other world-class intranet case studies showcases at the 2012 Intranet Global Forum in New York City, October 11 and 12.