SAS's Year Of Living SociallySAS's Year Of Living Socially

Rick Wicklin considers himself too busy for Facebook, but he loves the Hub, his employer's "Facebook inside our company" enterprise social network.

Wicklin is one of the experts on statistical software development at SAS Institute. Prior to creating the Hub, SAS already had other collaboration systems in place, such as SharePoint, and implemented wikis and blogs on its intranet for knowledge sharing. But the Hub caught Wicklin's attention in a way those other tools never had.

"I guess the difference between the Hub and all those others is that I use the Hub, and I didn't really use the others," Wicklin said. Internal blogs were a fine vehicle for "a select few" within the organization who committed to maintaining them, and wikis could be useful for finding specific information, but the Hub couldn't be beat for browsing through short messages from people across the organization, in search of the "serendipitous moment" of finding something he hadn't been looking for (but still found useful) from someone he never would have connected with otherwise, he said.

We first reported on SAS's implementation of Socialcast in April, when it was fairly new. The company did an informal launch of the software in January 2011 and had more than 1,000 users within a month. By the end of the year, the Hub had nearly 8,000 users out of the company's 12,000 employees. The adoption is even greater than it might sound from that, given that the total employee count includes people like landscapers and food service workers, who don't use a computer to do their jobs. In divisions like research and development, use of the Hub is nearly universal.

[ Why wouldn't every organization flock to the vision of an agile, transparent, people-centered, and collaborative team? Read 10 Enterprise Social Networking Obstacles. ]

SAS is a prominent analytics software vendor, but there are other reasons to pay attention to its example--particularly if your organization values having happy, productive employees. For the past two years, SAS has ranked 1 on Fortune's list of the 100 best companies to work for.

SAS internal communication manager Becky Graebe said the Hub is delivering on the goal of providing new ways for employees to connect and collaborate. "People ask me, 'Do you think this is cutting down on email?' Well, I'm not measuring that right now. Our intent was to get people communicating more, not less. We're a knowledge-based organization, so this is focused on knowledge sharing. We're trying to get knowledge out of the minds of our employees, out onto the table where it can be talked about."

VMware acquired Socialcast in May, putting it at the center of a division that develops cloud and social software applications and acquires startups in those areas. Graebe said SAS has been happy with the support it has received from Socialcast, but because of the way it has rebranded the environment, most employees probably don't even realize that it's Socialcast under the covers.

One particularly high-impact program launched atop the Hub was an Innovation Day event organized around brainstorming new product ideas, which continued for months after the designated day, with contributions from employees around the world. "I don't know of any tool we had previously that would have allowed us to do that," Graebe said.

Use of the Hub is not mandatory, but it's becoming central to many companywide processes, Graebe said. For example, when CEO Jim Goodnight conducts a webcast town hall meeting, employees are invited to submit questions in advance through a forum on the Hub. During the event, employees can also participate in "live tweeting" Q&A and commentary, where routine questions can often be answered by other employees, or by the corporate communications staff, if they don't require the attention of the CEO. Several senior sales executives have taken to doing something similar, she said. Communications from executives to employees is only the beginning.

"It provides a way to collaborate across divisions, across departments, and also across countries or time zones," Wicklin said. He particularly values it because the nature of his job in research and development means he works "with a small number of people in a fairly specialized area" and has limited opportunities to meet other people in the company, other than at events like lunchtime seminars or through the soccer league. "This is another venue to meet people and find out who knows what about what," he said, and has helped him identify others in the organization "who really know their stuff."

Wicklin has worked for the company for 15 years, but even people he has known for a long time often reveal expertise and interests through the online forums that he never suspected before. He keeps a blog on statistical software and uses Twitter to promote those posts, but he doesn't have a Facebook account and says he has really learned the ways of social media through the Hub.

In one instance, his involvement on the Hub led to a change in corporate policy--or, at least, the scrapping of a policy that was no longer being enforced. Looking at competitors' websites and social media pages, he had noticed that a range of their employees were involved in answering customer questions. He wondered if SAS employees should be doing the same--even though, ever since he came to work at the company, he had been told that all such questions should be routed through SAS technical support rather than being addressed informally. When he broadcast that question, he got a response saying that the old policy was outdated and he could safely ignore it. Because a member of the corporate communications team was monitoring that conversation, that informal ruling was transformed into an official announcement of a new policy empowering employees to engage more in answering those questions, rather than leaving them all to tech support.

"I'd never gotten the official world that this was now okay, but as a result of the discussion on the Hub that comment turned into a corporate decision, which was then advertised," Wicklin said.

In addition to providing a broad company social network for all employees, the Hub includes interest groups that help him connect with other employees who work in his specialty or related specialties. Trying to email everyone who might know the answer to a question would be impractical and awkward, but in a social environment employees decide which coworkers and what topics they want to follow. If a competitor is making a claim, and Wicklin wants to reality check it, or find out how SAS products stack up in comparison, he can post a question like that to the group and get a knowledgeable answer, he said. For Wicklin, the Hub is largely a resource for collaborating on technical topics. As a member of the SAS leadership development group, Chris Tunstall has a different focus. He is the organizer of a group on the Hub called "Leaders Develop Daily, Not in a Day," focused on long-term leadership strategies. "We've got close to 700 members, which really surpasses my expectations of what I thought we were going to get," he said. He is impressed not just with the number of people but with the quality of their posts, he said.

The Hub provides a great way to share quotes about leadership, links to Web resources, and articles from publications like Harvard Business Review, Tunstall said. Some of the group's regulars were among the "select few" who maintained intranet blogs prior to the advent of the Hub, and those blogs have not gone away, but now they're typically promoted and distributed more broadly through social links.

"One of the things that really stands out on the Hub is that it's a one-stop shop you can go to," Tunstall said. "You're not jumping around to different SharePoint sites, but you can get a constant stream" of items of interest, customized on the basis of the people and groups you follow.

The Hub isn't all business. There are groups promoting fitness and hobbies. Graebe said SAS has imposed few restrictions, but she has also heard no reports of people misusing the social network. Some supervisors may be suspicious that employees are wasting too much time on the Hub, but the software provides tools that allow a supervisor to look at all an employee's posts and whether they are related. Generally, managers are satisfied once they have reviewed those logs, she said.

Wicklin said there are indeed opportunities to waste time on the Hub. Most of them he can avoid by, for example, not signing up for the group where people share pictures of their cats.

"Time wasting is a danger not just on social media but with the Internet," he said. "I go to check the weather and see there is a hurricane brewing in the Caribbean, and I click on a link and another link, and then I have to slap myself to get back to work. I do think it is incumbent upon the employees to give a fair day's work for a fair wage. But just like people use any technology to do good things and bad things, it's not the technology that's good or bad, it's how you use it."

Follow David F. Carr on Twitter @davidfcarr. The BrainYard is @thebyard

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