Implementing Enterpise 2.0 at Vistaprint Part Three: Operational Impact

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March 7th, 2010

This is part three in a series of four posts on how Vistaprint has been implementing Enterprise 2.0 at their organization.  Today we continue the discussion with more information on change management followed by a focus on the ideation work.

There were two key organizational changes that happened as a result of their E2.0 implementation efforts.  The first was the creation of a full-time innovation management position.  The purpose of this position was to ensure that the right ideas got in front of the right people.  This position was also used to make employees aware of the successes that occurred as a result of collaborative idea sharing and to generate excitement around the ideation program.

The second change that occurred was the creation of a knowledge management group.  Ninety-five percent of the effort came from people, process, training, adoption, and roll out and only 5% from technology.  The knowledge management group was required to address all of these inputs and to help keep Vistaprint’s Enterprise 2.0 endeavors moving in the right direction.

Intuit’s Brainstorm platform has been in use at Vistaprint since March 2009, so it’s relatively new.  Ideation was a significant area of focus at Vistaprint.  Because Brainstorm was very easy to use,  Vistaprint’s broad community were happy to use it.  However, where shift needed to take place was around the habits of managers at functional level.  Managers needed to take ideas seriously and had to review them on a regular basis, otherwise the ideation program would become useless.   There had to be action taken on the ideas, or employees would stop participating.

Brainstorm connects through an active directory of employees which means that there was no additional sign up required.  Vistaprint’s goal of the ideation platform was quite simple: connect the right ideas to the right people and then take action on those ideas.  There were many ideas submitted through Brainstorm so the response time to an idea was within 6 weeks.  Sometimes responses happened much sooner, some even on the same day.  Others longer depending on the complexity of the ideas.  Those would require testing before being executed.  Typically, it took Vistaprint approximately 6 months to go from idea conception to idea delivery (note this does not mean response time but actual implementation).

For the wiki, the engineer project began in mid-2006.  In March 2007, the capabilities team opened up the wiki to small test group.  In late 2007/early 2008, Vistaprint made the wiki accessible company-wide (their knowledge management project).  Finally, in September 2008, the wiki opened company-wide.

We covered the wiki usage stats in the previous post; here are the stats for the ideation platform:

  • Vistaprint employs approximately 1950 people
  • In the last 30 days, there have been 373 active users
  • Employees submitted 415 unique ideas
  • A total of 1462 ideas have been submitted

Adoption of new technologies is paramount to Vistaprint’s success.   To enable adoption,  tactics to encourage employee usage included:

  • Internal newsletter that talks about the ideation platform
  • Employee recognition for those who contribute and collaborate on ideas
  • Training on the new tools/technologies (every new hire is also given training)
  • Creating awareness via a company-wide email when new features are added
  • Happy hour to celebrate submitted ideas.  Vistaprint tries to make each idea an opportunity to celebrate (which we think is interesting and clever)

A key strategy to the wiki adoption has been training.  Employees are encouraged to get the information live and not to worry about any formatting.  If they could get the information into one location, the knowledge management team would take care of the rest.  Again, the knowledge management team was the key driving force behind adoption, and maintaining and organizing the information and preserving standards.

Key takeaways

  • New roles/departments were created.  The innovation management position was responsible for the ideation platform and the knowledge management team for the wiki.
  • Functional habits of managers need to change so that ideas are taken more seriously and given focus.
  • The ideation platform has been in use since March of 2009 and over 20% of the company has submitted a unique idea.
  • The wiki project began in 2006 and only launched company wide 26 months later.
  • Vistaprint undertook several initiatives to help encourage and increase adoption.  They took a proactive stance rather than launch the project and allow it to grow organically.

Read previous posts from this series:

Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Vistaprint Part One: Business Drivers

Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Vistaprint Part Two: Change Management

TAGS: Collaboration, e2.0, Enterprise 2.0, enterprise 2.0 case study, enterprise 2.0 example, vistaprint

Is Collaborating, Listening, or Engaging Always a Good Thing?

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January 29th, 2010

Before reading on ask yourself this questions, is collaborating, engaging, or listening always a good thing?

Collaboration can take many forms either within a company or between a company and it’s customers and prospects.  However, as Morten Hansen says in his book Collaboration, there is no point in collaborating just for collaboration’s sake.  The whole point of any type of collaboration is always to meet a business need or objective.  This means that if you have departments or individuals collaborating but you aren’t seeing your business objectives met that there is potentially a problem.  The key to collaboration is action and this applies as much to Enterprise 2.0 as it does to external facing social media efforts.

When thinking about “listening” or engaging, again the important thing is not to listen or engage, it’s to gain ACTIONABLE insight (and to empower your customers and your team).  It’s important to make this distinction both when making the case for collaboration (or listening/engaging) and when measuring the results of these efforts.  There is no point in trying to sell a listening tool, engagement strategy, or collaboration initiative unless you can also sell the business objectives that you are going to meet.  Instead of saying “we are going to build a community around brand XYZ,” finish the sentence and say something like, “we are going to build a community around XYZ that is going to help us decrease market research costs which are currently rising,” or, “we are going to implement an internal collaboration platform to help unify our brand, improve productivity, and increase our rate of innovation; all problems that we are currently struggling with.”

There are a few key things to point out here:

  • Don’t sell collaboration (or anything else for that matter), sell the ability to meet a business objective (s)
  • When selling or looking to show results, make sure you have a solid understanding of the problem that you are looking to solve

Without action, collaboration, engaging, listening, and everything your company is looking to do is fruitless.

TAGS: Collaboration, engagement, Enterprise 2.0, is collaborating a good thing, listening, Social Business, social media

Why Dunbar’s Number is Irrelevant

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January 25th, 2010

For those of you not familiar with Dunbar’s number it basically says that the most amount of people that you can maintain stable social relationships with is 150.  According to wikipedia:
“Dunbar’s number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which [...]

TAGS: dunbar's number, online networks, strong ties, weak ties

Lessons Learned from Cubetree; an Enterprise Social Software Company

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January 22nd, 2010

I had the opportunity to speak with the CEO of Cubetree last night and one of the things we talked about were some of the lessons Cubetree has learned over the past 2 years of being in business.  I first became acquainted with Cubetree at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco where they won [...]

TAGS: cube tree, enterprise 2.0 strategy, enterprise social software, lessons learned, Social Business

Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing, Adjourning and Transforming

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January 20th, 2010

That’s quite a mouthful I know.  This concept was recently introduced to me by Gil Yehuda via email and was originally developed by Bruce Tuckman (in the 1960’s) who believed that these were all necessary phases for teams to go through in order for them to grow and deliver results (and to overcome challenges, tackle [...]

TAGS: adjourning, bruce tuckman, forming, group development, group dyanmics, norming, performing, storming, team building, team interaction, transorming