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I follow with interest Laurie Buczek’s entries on Twitter. She has recently shared her satisfaction for the large number of groups at Intel’s communities platform. I got in touch to ask Laurie to share a bit of Intel’s experience with social computing.

What follows is the result of that exchange and, I can tell you, it was the quickest e-interview in KMOL’s eight-year history.

The first question I have relates to your title: Social Computing Programme Manager. Do you feel that having “social computing” in your title has opened doors for you or, instead, has made your work harder?

Great question. It is a mixture of both positive and a hindrance. The positive is that peers and experts across the industry understand the term “social computing”. If I had used a title such as “Collaboration 2.0 Program Manager” it might have been too nebulous. On the flip side, the term “social” has negative connotations inside an enterprise. It brings with it misperceptions that I am creating a place for employees to goof off and not get work done.

I recently made the call to modify my program’s name to “Enterprise 2.0 Program”. I am taking a play from the Andrew McAfee playbook and reducing the use of the term “social”. I still will align to industry standard terminology but will have removed a word that creates barriers.

How many people are there supporting you in the implementation of the social computing strategy?

Intel is deploying everything inside our firewall. This takes more resources and more efforts than if we leveraged externally hosted solutions.

Besides myself, I have one other full time employee who is managing products and projects. I do have several other resources that are partially dedicated from system engineers, developers, human factors engineer, security specialists, training and communication. I probably have an equivalent of 8-10 full time employees.

Based on all I’ve read about the work you are doing, your approach does not seem to be IT-oriented (but rather people-led). So, how come you are part of the IT department?

Great question. Inside Intel, IT has always owned the responsibility to deploy and support global solutions. We do have business niche solutions that have birthed from grass root efforts, but they are disjointed and perpetuate the silos.

I came from outside of IT and I was hired because of my “people centric” background. My boss recognized that more of a quasi social scientist versus a traditional technologist was necessary to successfully bring social computing to the enterprise.

One of the first things I had to do was have the team put various capabilities in play on hold while we did the foundational work to connect with customers and design a framework that overlaid how workers naturally work. I had to create a shift in mindset. It is sometimes difficult for an IT organization to hear that the work they are tasked with is 25% about the technology and 75% about how people work and adopt new ways of working.

Is there a Knowledge Management function at Intel (even if by other name)?

We have had knowledge management efforts come and go across various divisions. Unlike some other companies, we don’t have a centralized organization to do KM.

When a company’s culture is on the lower end of the spectrum for centralized KM and sharing of knowledge, then it is a more intensive effort to make the necessary cultural shift. I have to teach and reward people to “share” and value more transparency of information across Intel. This takes time.

You have recently talked about “resident social scientists” at Intel. May you please briefly describe their roles? Where do they sit in the organizational structure?

We have a small group in People and Practices Research, Intel’s social science oriented research team in Intel Labs. They are tasked with exploring fundamental paradigms and phenomena of everyday life in order to help Intel think critically about how people, practices and institutions matter to technological innovation and to conceive of experiences for the future. This research feeds into our product development. Some of the anthropologists within this organization are now becoming embedded with human factors engineering organizations across various business groups, IT being one. This is a bonus for my efforts, I now have both cultural anthropologists and traditional human factors engineers who can be a consultative resource for my program.

The use of social tools at Intel has started, as in pretty much all organisations, at grass root level. As such, many different tools were being used across the company. What kind of tools were they using and what were they using them for?

We likely have every flavor of 2.0 technology deployed as business niche solutions.

The largest amount is wiki. We have over 200 unique instances of wikis that we are now attempting to consolidate. Wikis have been used inside Intel for traditional “encyclopedia” type information to our engineer teams using them for full end-to-end project management.

Blogs and forums are used for personal and work narrative. On demand video is being used heavily for training. We also have a niche micro-blog solution that a few employees use for a “Twitter-like” experience behind the firewall.

Your strategy which, I heard you say to Stowe Boyd, is at “Fix What We’ve Got” stage, includes bringing all those disparate tools together under the same platform whilst making sure they are still available through the places employees feel most comfortable with. That is far from being an easy task, both from a technical as well as from a human perspective. How has that been for Intel?

It is definitely challenging! We launched our first phase in mid-March of 2009. At the beginning of August we entered into pilot with our new wiki. We have two more major deployments before the close of 2009. Those include a global on demand video solution and enhancing our platform with social search and richer people profiles.

It has been a significant amount of work to test and select products; pilot & deploy; plus help teams of people apply these over their business problems.

Since we are moving beyond the grass root efforts, we had to invest in the right amount manpower and resources to execute. Intel has also had to take a more dedicated Governance approach which means increased involvement from HR, Legal and our security teams.

It also is taking us longer to deploy since we have to architect enterprise sound services versus science experiments. I am very lucky to have a solid team that stays focused and executes well. I also have been pleasantly surprised by the rate of adoption of our new platform. It has far exceeded our expectations.

To sum it up in a nutshell, we feel like we are running a marathon uphill every day. But we are getting closer to the crest of the hill.

What are the next stages in Intel’s phased approach to the social computing strategy?

2009 is the solid foundation work. In the first half of 2010, we begin to integrate into work flow and business processes - Phase II. Our platform will be pulled into line of business applications and traditional office computing solutions. This is a very critical phase for increased usage, adoption and extracting full business value.

Once we get the integration done, we will enter a third phase which begins to add richness to the stack. My hope is that we can open up some our applications API’s and allow Intel employees to innovate & create widgets/mashups that can enrich the user experience.

Your social computing approach seems to be about creating online the type of interactions people feel comfortable with (1:1, 1:some, 1:many, etc.). Does Intel consciously create in their offices physical environments that are equally conducive to conversations?

You are correct about the approach. It is the way collaboration naturally occurs.

Our physical environments don’t support this as effectively as it should. In 2008, an effort was kicked off called The Way We Work. This initiative is beginning to make-over our 40-year-old cubicle style offices into a environment that is more open and has spaces for different types of interaction.

I believe the change in the physical environment coupled with the 2.0 technologies is particularly necessary to evolve into a work style that supports the next generation workforce.

Could you give us a sense of how much Intel is investing into this strategy?

Unfortunately I cannot disclose the exact amount. What I can tell you is that it is a very small percentage of our IT budget. These technologies are very inexpensive compared to traditional office productivity tools. It doesn’t take long to recoup your initial investment.

What are the “What’s In It For Me”s that Intel is using to encourage people to use and benefit from the tools?

The “What’s In It For Me” is essential. We have created business value statements and usage models to demonstrate the personal value. We are honing in on the pain points we hear most often and showing employees how they can get work done more effectively with these tools. I have a one page document that shows the “current” way of doing various tasks such as finding project updates and then showing the “evolved” way with using wikis, blogs and content aggregation and syndication.

We drive home that this will reduce number of meetings across globally dispersed teams; make their communication more effective and better connect people who work together, but never met in person. The light bulb goes off after we demonstrate this.

In parallel, we are also working with senior leaders to help them drive a top-down mantra that we will evolve the way we work and get rewarded for it.

The bottom line is that employees do what they are rewarded for in their performance review. We must reward the behavior we want to see.

I am not going to ask you about ROI because, after only a year into this, it is too early to talk hard numbers. However, I would love to know the type of goals you have set yourselves. What “things” do you want to change? What pains do you want to reduce?

You are the ONLY person not asking me for ROI :-)

For the last 12 months I have been tackling the ROI questions. I think we are finally at a point where executives realize that you don’t have instantaneous ROI with 2.0 technologies but you can define the business value you want to achieve and show your progress towards those goals.

We have a group of early adopter organizations, with executive sponsorship, that we have documented there “AS IS” state and set goals for their “WILL BE” state. We are now in the process of helping those teams overlay our platform and measure progress towards their goals. We have gained agreement to leverage a “quantify as you go” model.

Some of the areas that business groups want to change is to improve dissemination of information across a group; enhance technical leadership development efforts via community; drive faster and better on boarding of newly hired employees; improve effective collaboration across globally dispersed teams (reduce number of meetings; get discussions out of email; shift from document-based collaboration to web-based); help employees search and find people with experience and expertise to assist their work. These don’t all have easy to quantify aspects.

At a minimum, we have to demonstrate we have returned annual value back that is as much as we have invested. Most of the hard dollar return will be in savings. On top of the deeper dive business value studies, we also have traditional metrics that look at adoption, usage and engagement. We want the metrics to show upward trends.

What do you consider your biggest successes / achievements so far?
Our biggest success is getting a strategy, architecture and funded program. That was my #1 task when I first got my job.

The second is beginning to bring that strategy to life amidst all the internal and cultural barriers.

Last, the adoption of our current platform by teams and organizations plus senior executives are now engaged to explore and understand the value for their business units. The amount of organizations beginning the shift in the way they work exceeds our expectations – says we are doing something right.

What are the biggest challenges you have faced in the course of your work as the Social Computing Programme Manager?

1. Lack of pervasive top-down support
2. Cultural shift towards sharing of information from “need to know” mentality
3. Dispel concerns around security, legal and HR matters
4. Persuading employees to “change”
5. The ROI question that always looms overhead.

What lessons learned could you share with those organisations which are keen to start exploring social tools as a support to their strategic activity?
I wrote a blog post on my Beyond the Cube blog that has a lot of items in there:

1. Build a strategy and an integrated architecture so you have a “compass”
2. Start off small with early adopters, then expand deployment once you have solid business value case studies
3. Deploy an integrated platform, not disparate tools. If you create technology islands, then they are out of sight and out of mind
4. Integrate and deploy a suite of 3-5 tools to begin. Deploying just one technology will only get limited value. I recommend a platform that has networking, wikis, blogs/forums and content syndication/aggregation
5. Define the business value and how you will measure success
6. Team up with Finance person to validate business value framework
7. Ensure that you have key HR, Legal, Security & IT stakeholders building Governance from the start
8. Validate efforts using benchmarking of peer organizations
9. Be user centric – usability has to be #1 criteria. Users expectations have been set by consumerized tools – goal is to create similar experience but with enterprise grade performance/security.