OppenheimerFunds Webinar: Follow-Up Q&A Blog

If you attended our recent webinar with Codey Fredenhagen and Colleen Bridges of OppenheimerFunds, you know their corporate intranet, called MyOFI and built on SharePoint 2010 and NewsGator Social Sites 2010, has grown virally throughout the organization. We had so many questions from the audience we weren’t able to get to all of them during the webinar. Fortunately, Codey and Colleen were gracious enough to take the time to answer the rest of them via this follow-up blog. Here they are:

Rollout

1.  How do you or did you measure adoption and collaboration? Do you use any specific tools or strategies?

a.  We have developed specific SQL queries that export the data out of the database and then report in Excel.  We are taking the basic metrics at this point (e.g., how many events by type week over week, how much event activity per Community).

b. We learned at the NewsGator Collective user group meeting, however, that these might not be the best measures. Some companies are using metrics around how quickly information was found, measuring the perception of speed gained in finding knowledge and the increase in collaboration.  We are looking at how we can best measure this in our environment.

2.  Can they tell us more about the Change Management group?  What was their focus and what type of resources made up this group - HR, Communications, etc.?

a. The Change Management (CM) Group is comprised of Corporate Communications, Project Governance & Delivery, SharePoint Development, Corporate Training, Marketing, Legal and Compliance.  It’s a team of about eight people for a 2,000 person employee base.

b. The CM Group is primarily geared to address “social” collaboration. Their goal is to teach about and introduce people to a new way of getting information to others that need it. The group initially focused on how to drive adoption and awareness, but now is more focused on communicating the value of “collaboration.”   

c. The CM Group was absolutely vital to making the implementation of MySite and Communities a success. You need to build excitement across a diverse group – the CM Group is a cheerleader as well as a fighter when needed. In our functional groups it was crucial to have people that could cross those boundaries easily and effectively. It’s imperative to keep the CM Group diverse and positive. 

3. Did you perform any formal usability testing? If so, what types of insights came from that research? Did any customizations come from that research?

a. When it came to our corporate intranet site makeover, MyOFI, we had an experienced User Experience Team work through how best to lay out the site. It has really paid off. Finding information on the site is far better than it used to be. 

b. Also, the need to incorporate a consistent branding across all the sites was a key component to getting enterprise acceptance. Our previous efforts were not globally branded and it gave people an excuse to avoid an application that didn’t appear to be “corporate sponsored”.

Adoption
4. How are you educating users on E2.0 in general (i.e., why is E2.0 important vs. how to use Social Sites)?

a. There has been a tremendous amount of senior leadership campaigning and promoting the use of E2.0. We hold several demo sessions (Lunch-n-Learn, Tech Dojo, etc.)  We have seeded the community with some evangelists that were early adopters and believers in the medium. And we have specifically done some targeted training about when to use email, IM, blogs, and social (NewsGator). 

b. Education is probably the most important aspect of the implementation. You need to reinforce that it is okay to use this medium to communicate and promote its use. It has been a major shift for our company to communicate in this manner. 

Results/Benefits
5. How are you making the jump from social to business? In other words, what do you think will be the most productive use of this tool in your business environment?

a. It really has been more about the business and much less about the social. We rolled this out as a business tool to be used for business communication. This set the tone. It wasn’t introduced as a “water-cooler” substitute – more as a tool that would enable others to more easily collaborate. People recognize that “social” is effective in a business setting because people get what they need faster and more effectively than other means.

6. Is your implementation purely social or have you formally embedded any business processes (i.e., moved from some previous process to the Social Sites platform)?

a. We didn’t have any previous internal social application, so this was our initial foray into the space. We set the tone as “business only.”  All the business processes are embedded into MySite, the Intranet, and Communities. We found people are too busy trying to do their jobs; that just “social” was not worthwhile. The activities they perform are about getting work done. 

Governance
7. Do you let anyone create a Sphere in Social Sites? Or, do they have to request it and have someone with elevated privileges create it?

a. Spheres are available to anyone to create and manage – unlike Communities which are set up through an approval process to ensure people know the commitment that they must make for the site.

8. What are you putting in place to govern video? File format? File size? Raw/edited? Centralized videographers or does everyone gets a camera?

a. Video hasn’t taken hold too much. We do limit personal MySite storage and each Community also has a limit of 5GB. We can increase that if there is a reasonable request.

b. The governance of video falls under the strict electronic usage policy that we have established. 

c. We have installed some professional video components that comprise the main intranet site. These are managed by our Corporate Communications group and are professionally edited and produced. This was a large investment and commitment on the part of our Corporate Communication teams and it has been very well received. 

Management
9. Who maintains and monitors the social communication at OppenheimerFunds? Is it HR, IT or Corporate Communications? What challenges are you seeing, if any, with this?

a. All social, email, and IM communication is monitored by our Compliance department.

b. Surprisingly, there have been very few issues around the implementation of MyNewsfeed. We have more challenges with “lurkers” and encouraging them to contribute on the site instead of just consuming. 

Compliance
10. What technology does OppenheimerFunds use for archiving and retaining SharePoint content to comply with FINRA regulations?

a. Previous to installing NewsGator’s Newsfeeds, we had installed the company’s 17a-4, retention product. This tracks all of the “social” traffic and routes it to a searchable archival and monitoring solution.  The SharePoint content is also retained in an off-site backup that is archived for seven years. 

Thank you Codey and Colleen again for taking the time to answer these additional questions! If you miss the webinar, you should check it out!