Post 4 of 10 in a series of blog posts giving more insight into this year’s Intranet Innovation Award winners.

This case study is available in full as part of the free executive summary of the 2009 Intranet Innovation Awards report, which features dozens of high resolution screenshots, case studies of winners, and tips and advice for success on a wide range of intranet initiatives.

About Sabre
Sabre’s mission is clear: to connect people with the world’s greatest travel possibilities. As a world leader in the travel marketplace, Sabre Holdings merchandises and retails travel products and provides distribution and technology solutions for the travel industry. Sabre Holdings supports travellers, agents, corporations and travel suppliers worldwide through its companies:

• Travelocity, the most popular online service.
• Sabre Travel Network, which includes the world’s largest global distribution system (GDS), connecting travel agents and travel suppliers with travellers.
• Sabre Airline Solutions, the leading provider of decision-support tools, reservations systems and consulting services for airlines

Not so long ago, employees in Sabre’s few offices would congregate in hallways and around water coolers to discuss current projects, share information they had recently acquired, ask and answer business questions and, yes, even socialise a little.

Today, Sabre has grown into a workforce that’s highly dispersed, working from a variety of remote locations, on the road, or telecommuting. In a three-year period, Sabre went from a company where 85% of its employees worked in the United States to a company where 55% of the employees worked in one of 59 countries outside of the US.

However, such a change also meant an increasingly disconnected workforce that was spending way too much time searching for the expertise they needed to get jobs done, if they could find it at all, and using a business toolset that wasn’t helping them connect or collaborate across boundaries.

The solution? Sabre Town. A social networking solution that enabled company employees to once again engage each other in a single location in order to provide the collective abilities of all employees to help answer the questions of each employee.

The Sabre Town employee social network is a stand-alone community platform that uses Single Sign On and XML data exchange to seamlessly integrate into the existing Intranet and other portal platforms.

Benefits of Sabre Town
The benefits of the social network are as limitless as the ways it can be used. At the highest level, Sabre Town:

• Creates a stronger company culture: Allows for inclusion, internal networking and diverse personalities to shine. It adds faces and backstories to the names and titles.
• Captures, stores, and makes available collective wisdom: Allows many to share in a single knowledge base, and all to access that knowledge in real time.
• Minimises new hire ramp time: Allows shared knowledge to benefit new employees beyond new hire training and as continuing education throughout a career.
• Reduces communication lag time and geographic divide: Allows many employees to quickly answer questions and build on each other’s thoughts, regardless of where they are located.
• Drives collaboration across organization: Allows for the skill sets and expertise of all employees to be searched and leveraged.
• Drives innovation: Allows many to contribute, post and act on new concepts.
• Minimises knowledge loss from departing employees: Retains expertise and answers in a searchable format.
• Provides a unique window into the company: Is a high level explicit and implicit data aggregator helping determine what subject matters are popular, relevant, and who has a reputation for expertise in them.

These are just some of the benefits Sabre found with their new platform. Designed with purpose and with defined improvements in employee engagement, and hard dollar savings outlined ($500k in 2008 alone), it’s a benchmark example of using social network-based technology in the workplace for the good of the organisation.

(For full details of this Award-winning entry, download the executive summary, or obtain a copy of the 198-page Intranet Innovations 2009 report.)

But for most of us to really get strategic value from social business, we’ll need to understand the ground rules. In other words, let’s ask and answer the tough questions in making this transition:

Are social business activities generally better than non-social business activities?

How does having a social business help the bottom line and the long-term health of an organization?

What, in the end, does “taking a business social” really mean?

[Thanks to Bill Ives.]

Web 2.0 technology presents the modern organisation with a plethora of means for communicating new information to staff. While some of us are now running to install wikis and blogs as a vehicle to achieve enterprise 2.0 nirvana there are some important considerations that need to be given time before we jump for, say, Yammer over Twitter, that go beyond the fear of our internal information being communicated outside the organisation.

With all the talk about the inability to show demonstrable ROI in social computing, it’s refreshing to see a company lay out the benefits so clearly. Though all the gains from social media can’t be distilled down into hard numbers, there’s plenty of returns across the business. One instance was a substantial jump in 401K enrollments after users were encouraged to develop a social media-based campaign targeted at its younger, gen-Y workforce. Through the use of video, blogs and other user-generated content, 401K dissenters were converted after the benefits were delivered in a collaborative, engaging way.

I’m reading an increasing amount of stuff taking swipes at social media along the lines of … it was all just hype … it’s not delivering what it promised etc. I guess it was only a matter of time before we switched from build-it-up mode to knock-it-down mode which so often seems to pervade our culture these days.

He points out that inactives (people that cannot be reached through social technologies) has reduced from 44% to 25%. This means that three fourths of the US online users is touched by social technologies. Also note that more people who consume this content has increased from 48% to 69%.

I think this type of information is interesting, but shouldn’t be blown out of proportion. This is just one survey of modest size in the US. Every organisation has it’s own unique audience, and as Jermiah highlights, specific research should be conducted before making concrete decisions.

Explicitly or not, different Social Software products target different use cases. Understanding the business scenarios that fit better or worse for the different packages enables you to see deeper into their relative strengths and weaknesses for your particular circumstances. Therefore, we have identified eleven common scenarios against which vendors can be judged. Each scenario emphasizes to varying degrees the features we elaborated in the previous section.

With these mediums we put appropriate policies in place, sometimes train people on acceptable conduct and rely on trusting individuals to do the right thing, to act in their own self-interest (continued employment) and back these up with potential legal options (scaling up from disciplinary action) to ensure usage is appropriately managed.

Should government agencies treat public social networks differently to other mediums, as people are behaving in a less formal manner but may still be indirectly representing the organisation?

The results have been spectacular: 60% of questions are answered within one hour (one hour!); each question receives an average of 9 responses (9 responses!). The system has already led to more than $150,000 in immediate, direct savings for the company, with much greater benefits not yet measured.