Minicase :- Suncorp implement an internal social network

The Suncorp financial services group manages 25 brands in Australia and New Zealand spanning
banking, insurance, investment and superannuation. Suncorp has over 219,000 shareholders, over
16,000 employees and around 7 million customers. Suncorp has used enterprise social networking
tool Yammer to help geographically dispersed people and teams to connect, share, discuss and
innovate. It has also helped Suncorp create a culture where col- laboration is more natural by
enabling people to interact online in an open, informal and transparent way.

Within a matter of months, Yammer membership grew from a handful of early adopters to over
1,700 users and continues to grow. Jeff Smith, Suncorp, the Chief Information Office of Yammer,
explains the benefits as follows: Yammer has enabled us to harness the wisdom of our people who
are spread across multiple teams, geog- raphies and brands to help achieve our purpose of
delivering business solutions for competitive advantage. Brian Robbins, Chief Marketing Office
(CMO), added: We recently signed up for Yammer and are seeing it spread virally among our
employees. It is helping us accelerate collaboration and internal communications across our 20,000
employees in 300 offices in 30 countries. We’re seeing all kinds of serendipitous connections across
projects, cultures and time zones. The benefits of applying a tool like Yammer to Suncorp can be
summarised as: ● Increased informal knowledge flow across the organisation through
microblogging. ● Overcome barriers to collaboration, providing instant connection for people,
teams, informal networks, communities of practice and other shared interest groups. ● Improved
alignment between executives and employees by use of broadcast message to communicate
messages and quickly crowdsource to get ideas, suggestions and answers to questions. ● Helped
stimulate greater sharing and discussion amongst common role groups, e.g. developers, architects
and testers