I was just in Germany at the #JamCamp! I met up with one of the earliest adopters of Social — Bayer!
I wanted to share their storyas told to the audience by Kurt De Ruwe, the visionary CIO who began this social collaboration revolution inside the company. (See Kurt and I below after our lunch together discussing next steps!)
With over 111k employees, Kurt and team had several challenges. They had several teams working on the same problem across the world with duplication of effort and no real sharing of the solutions. With an aging population, Kurt had 35% of the people with thorough process and tool knowledge that were going to retire in the next 7 to 10 years.
So he set out to help Bayer become more competitive. With a primary Social question in mind, he drove to create a culture where sharing is seen as normal and to stimulate the innovation process.
He piloted a set of communities in R&D (for innovation) and O&I (for social knowledge management of best practices). His progress and viral usage was amazing.
The pilot he started in the Materials Areas is now set to be ssed throughout his company. The R&D team focused on innovation, communities to spark the spirit of the team, and to facilitate crowdsourcing of ideas. For O&I, he wisely worked on setting up places of sharing, communities to drive better practices, and to reach the teams at all levels.
The success of his innovation stimulation and best practice sharing was built on a set of simple principles:
This is great stuff!…I imagine this could be the basis or laying the basic foundation for the introduction of social into any large organisation. Thanks for sharing, Sandy.