And succeed they have. Take Bayer’s MaterialScience CIO Kurt De Ruwe, who tells me that introducing social technologies into Bayer has created an irreversible movement: “You can’t stop it. Once you make it available to people on the right platform the magic happens. The users are driving adoption, creating value and they are much happier. All in all it’s inexpensive to run and the impact it has on the organization, though difficult to quantify in numbers, is huge.”
De Ruwe is referring to the internal social technologies introduced a few years ago on IBM Connections. Initially they started with 50 users, quickly grew it to 2,000, then to 6,000 and today De Ruwe boasts, “we have more than 15,000 users, and in a few weeks’ time we’ll open up the system that ideally will be able to be used by hundreds of thousands of people.”
This is not some passing fad. This is a movement – a movement at Bayer that was helped implicitly through CIO participation.
“Why do I participate?” De Ruwe asks, “If you don’t do it then your internal employees will find a way of leading themselves. Externally, if you're active yourself, then you quickly understand what the possibilities and value are for the company. Additionally, I use Twitter because for me, it’s a good way for learning about new things in my field and staying updated on what is going on.”
Like any initiative, executives like to see benefits. De Ruwe has no shortage of them. Here are a few Bayer has seen internally:
- They find experts faster and more efficiently: De Ruwe
cites a recent program around building and maintaining plants where employees have created profiles for themselves and allowed others to label them as experts or skilled in certain fields. Now, finding teams of experts for building and maintaining plants has never been easier. - Employees share a lot more information – “It’s Culture Changing”: Visibility across Bayer has never
been better. Even executives are getting involved. As De Ruwe explains, “micro-blogging is basically engaging with just anybody in the organization that wants to engage with them. That is totally creating a different culture environment in the organization.” Employees now better understand the organization’s mission and the projects that support it. - One place where knowledge and people can connect: De
Ruwe credits Bayer Board Member Dr. Richard Pott for urging this initiative forward. Bayer uses IBM Connections to connect people with people and people to documents and information. It’s made people and information much easier to find. - The Power of the crowd: “Two years ago Bayer decided to
upgrade its whole office environment to standardize Microsoft, and as a consequence of that we were going to shut down IBM Connections,” De Ruwe told me, “but the reaction that we got from the user community was so loud and disapproving that we decided against it.” There’s no way that reaction would have happened if Bayer didn’t have a social platform in place. - Executives are more accessible: Drawing from his own
experience De Ruwe illustrates, “My team knows if they want to have a quick answer for me then they post something on my board and then usually within a few hours they get a response.” He prefers that method to email because the question and answer become more visible and searchable. That way he’s not repeating the same answer time after time.
These benefits don’t come without hard work. It’s an evolutionary process that evolves over time. Doug Heintzman, IBM’s Director of Strategy for Collaboration Solutions explains, “It's not that you rollout a process and a productivity guru then imagines best practices around deployment. The reality is that in different countries with different cultures and different locations with different demographic profiles - there's going to be different patterns. You need to engage people so that they have the ability to input and tune those business processes because they will see and identify opportunities for continuous process improvement.”
De Ruwe’s has been able to get 66% of Bayer Material Science employees using the whole platform on a regular basis. He’s quite pleased with that. “Sometimes if people ask me to quantify in Euros or dollars what the platform has delivered to us – I tell them to look at the change of mindset, the open information sharing, and how quickly information passes around Bayer. Things that otherwise may have taken two or three weeks to uncover, now take hours.”
It’s hard to argue with that kind of transparency. It’s hard to argue with that kind of success.
It’s time we all jumped in.
