Enterprise Social Networking Helps ABB

Innovate and Grow

A
BB, headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, is a global supplier of power
grids, industrial motors and drives, and generators for industrial, com-
mercial, and utility operations. The company has about 135,000
employees in 100 countries around the world and is noted for its innovations
in ship propulsion and power transmission. Collaboration, sharing informa-
tion, and ongoing innovation are essential for ABB’s growth and business
success.
ABB had a corporate intranet, but man-
agement believed it was too static and
outmoded to meet its current needs for
empowering and energizing employees.
The intranet had poor capabilities for
searching for information, and informa-
tion was often added instead of changed.
This often created two or more differ-
ent versions of the same content. ABB
employees were storing information in
wikis, local file servers, and other knowl-
edge platforms besides the intranet, add-
ing to the confusion and inefficiency.
There were nine different platforms
employees might need to access to do
their work. Additionally, the intranet
lacked tools to help staff have dialogues,
share ideas, and work with other mem-
bers of the company, including people
that they might not know. © Andrey Popov/Shutterstock

What ABB needed was a central resource that would support dynamic
knowledge sharing. The entire staff would be able to easily locate information
about the company as well as updates on the latest developments of current
initiatives and projects. Tools that would help employees work more closely
together—including the ability to locate employees in other parts of the com-
pany who were experts in specific subjects—would help streamline operations
and speed up key business functions.
ABB replaced its outmoded intranet with one called Inside+ that is more
dynamic and socially enabled. Inside+ provides ABB employees with a single
entry point to all the information and tools they need for their jobs. These
include Microsoft Yammer, Office 365, and Sharepoint.
Yammer is an enterprise social networking platform used by more than
200,000 organizations worldwide. Yammer enables employees to create

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70 Part One Organizations, Management, and the Networked Enterprise

groups to collaborate on projects and share and edit documents and includes
a news feed to find out what’s happening within the company. Yammer can be
accessed through the web and desktop and mobile devices and can be integrated
with other systems such as Microsoft SharePoint and Office 365 to make other
applications more “social.” SharePoint is Microsoft’s platform for collaboration,
document sharing, and document management. Office 365 is Microsoft’s online
service for its Office productivity applications (word processing, spreadsheet,
electronic presentations, data management). Its mail service works seamlessly
with an online meeting and videoconferencing service, simplifying online
meetings.
Inside+ integrates all the key internal platforms that employees use for their
work. Individualized Yammer feeds occupy the left half of the landing page. An
employee’s Yammer feed displays e-mail messages and updates to documents
that person has been working on. Conversations on Yammer are archived and
searchable. Employees can access Microsoft SharePoint from their Inside+
toolbar, and Office 365 applications are also seamlessly linked to Yammer. This
enterprise social network is now used by 50,000 ABB employees-nearly one-
third of the company’s global workforce.
How has ABB benefited from becoming more “social”? Employees are using
Yammer and Inside+ to collaborate on projects, share ideas, and discover peo-
ple in other departments with useful expertise that could help them in their
work. Moving conversations from e-mail to Yammer has made discussions
more productive with better employee engagement. Some ABB teams report
that their e-mail messages have shrunk by 50 percent. Staff can be productive
anytime and anywhere because they are able to access Inside+ from smart-
phones and tablets. More than half the comments employees post come from
mobile devices. The company is also saving on conference costs. For example,
instead of flying 100 employees to Zurich for an annual communications con-
ference in 2012 and 2013, the company ran the conference online with all dis-
cussion housed and archived on Yammer. Many more employees feel closely
involved with the business as a whole—something that could not have been
achieved with the old system.

Sources: Adam Bonefeste, “ABB Reinvents Its Intranet with Social Networking Technology,”
www.yammer.com, January 28, 2015; Rachel Miller, “ABB Employees Have 50,000 Reasons to
Discover Yammer,” allthingsic.com, accessed March 8, 2016; and www.abb.com, accessed
March 14, 2016.

A BB’s experience illustrates how much organizations today rely on informa-

tion systems to improve their performance and remain competitive. It also
shows how much systems supporting collaboration and teamwork make a dif-
ference in an organization’s ability to innovate, execute, and grow profits.
The chapter-opening diagram calls attention to important points raised by
this case and this chapter. ABB itself is a knowledge-intensive company that
prizes innovation, but it was hampered by outdated processes and tools for
managing information that prevented employees and managers from working
efficiently and effectively. This affected the company’s ability to create and
deliver new leading-edge products and services.
ABB management decided that the best solution was to deploy new technol-
ogy to move from a static corporate knowledge and work environment to one