SUCCESS STORY
Momentive Performance Materials
Use Social Collaboration
to Align and Engage Key Stakeholders
 |
|
Momentive Performance Materials is the world's second largest producer of silicones and silicone derivatives and a global leader in the development and manufacturing of products derived from quartz and specialty ceramics. These materials are used in multiple industries including aerospace, agriculture, semiconductor, telecommunications, healthcare, and automotive.
Business challenge
When Momentive first launched Vignette Collaboration, now Open Text Collaboration, Vignette Edition, it was eagerly embraced by their scientists, chemists, and other staff who work on research and development projects and sales initiatives. However, it wasn’t long before the vast volume of documentation generated by the different teams brought with it some significant communication and collaboration challenges for the organization.
“As more and more information was uploaded and diverged deeper and deeper into sub-communities, this information became separated from other projects. Unless they were in the inner circle of a particular project, chemists working on other projects that might benefit from this information would not know where to find it. This is also true for other departments like finance or marketing, who might want to look up sales initiatives or other figures they need to produce their reports,” says Luke Otten, Web Development Leader from Momentive Performance Materials. “They needed to find a way to somehow surface this information up into either a Web site or portal so it was more accessible to the different groups."
Momentive wanted to try to make better use of the wikis, forums, and blogs that were already available in Collaboration, Vignette Edition. “There were several people who were already using these tools, but they felt they would have more success if they could push these tools into a portal setting. Mainly, they wanted to be able to use things like wikis and forums to show research material. They also thought it would be a good idea to take those email chains and funnel all of those replies directly into a forum as a way of centralizing and containing those discussions for other people to view,” adds Otten.
Momentive wanted to streamline its established business processes so they could not only combine information better around particular functions, but also find a way of enabling real-time discussions.
Social Communities
Momentive saw social media and Web 2.0 technology as essential in addressing their concerns and began looking at alternative ways to encourage the exchange of knowledge within the company.
“We decided that Open Text Social Communities (formerly Vignette Community Applications) would be the best solution because we were already using Open Text Web Experience Management (formerly Vignette Content Management) and Collaboration, Vignette Edition where we store a large number of documents. This solution would offer us the easiest way to aggregate that content and serve it up through Open Text Portal (formerly Vignette Portal) without creating a lot of extra work for our users,” explains Otten.
Momentive also engaged Open Text partner, Xpediant Solutions, to help implement the project. Xpediant is a leading provider of innovative, comprehensive, Web-based solutions and has worked on many similar projects. “Social Communities is built on two powerful, tested platforms: Collaboration, Vignette Edition and Portal,” says Kevin Punwasi, Operations Manager at Xpediant Solutions. “In terms of a social media solution, everything that you could possibly want such as blogs, wikis, forums, events, photo management, idea management, video, et cetera, is available with Social Communities. It's all out-of-the-box and doesn't require custom coding to use these applications. The Web 2.0 tools are all delivered through Portal, which gives organizations a lot of flexibility around presentation and the user interface and it also serves as a very robust integration platform. You can integrate content from other Open Text products or from other content management vendors. You can also integrate custom applications or SharePoint® or tie in legacy applications. It's an open framework. “
Diana Henrickson, architect and project leader at Xpediant, worked with Otten on the project. “Social Communities addressed Momentive’s social media requirements with out-of-the-box portlets. As we moved farther into the implementation, we also found that we needed to service existing Collaboration content such as financial dashboarding information that is contained in the form of an Excel® spreadsheet. The challenge was in exposing this data to Momentive’s common portal without impacting the way the business maintained their content. We addressed this by using a combination of custom portlets in Vignette Single Sign-on,” she explains.
Vignette Single Sign-on allows for a single sign on between the portal application and Collaboration, Vignette Edition. As a result, any assets stored in Collaboration, Vignette Edition will be correctly permissioned for portal users. This way, there is no need to relocate the content or change the way it was managed. Content is exposed seamlessly with Momentive’s portal solution.
Once implementation was underway, Otten and Henrickson worked closely with the different business groups to monitor the progress and encourage feedback. “Later, we took this information and made sure that our test cases addressed these scenarios,” says Henrickson. “We basically followed the “train the trainer” approach. If there was something new to be implemented, Luke and I would spend time understanding the technology and how it could be put into practical use by his business group. He would then train them and provide feedback on their needs or concerns. With this approach and proper documentation, we were able to focus on the business and technical aspects in parallel and achieve our goals more efficiently.”
New social intranet
Momentive’s social intranet, implemented on their departmental portal and built primarily using Web Experience Management, offers employees the same familiar navigational header and channel navigation structure/hierarchy that they were familiar with on their intranet and Internet sites.
The majority of the core content that is displayed in the page, including the Excel chart, is served up from Collaboration, Vignette Edition. “Xpediant built a custom portlet that will consume the Excel spreadsheet and then display it as an AJAX-formatted chart,” states Otten. “A user can roll over the different data bars and get an idea of the figures, which will give them a quick preview of the current status for sales initiatives or the performance of certain materials. There is also a standard calendar portlet on this page. A lot of the portlets from Web Experience Management were taken out-of- the-box and we added a bit of extra Cascading Style Sheets (CSS]. We also have a portlet that allows technology articles already written and stored in our intranet to be surfaced and viewed in this page.”
Visitors to the new social intranet will also find forums and blogs, again surfaced from Social Communities using out-of-the-box portlets and a little CSS.
The Global Process and Product Technology area of Momentive’s social intranet site manages a wealth of information related to actual functions like silicone fluids, elastomers, sealants, and so on. Xpediant built a custom market segments portlet that dynamically displays an image that is associated with a document in Collaboration, Vignette Edition. “This is an initiative from one of our silicone fluids business owners who wanted something similar to the presentation library where they can associate an image to a certain type of document, whether it be a Word document or a PDF and then be able to quickly update it. For PowerPoint® presentations, Social Communities has that functionality out-of-the-box. But for Word documents and PDFs, Xpediant built and formatted it to what they needed,” says Otten.
|
“Being able to find information and comment
on it rather than trying to track somebody
down, and centralizing those discussions for
everybody to find is probably the biggest
benefit of Open Text Social Communities for
us.” – Luke Otten, Web Development Leader
from Momentive Performance Materials |
This area also has custom chart portlets that dynamically display an Excel spreadsheet that is surfaced from Collaboration, Vignette Edition. “On this chart, there are multiple configurations. This way we can show relationships from multiple Excel spreadsheets to one area,” says Otten. “We also have a ‘Contact’ portlet on the top right side of the page where we can display the key business owners, their title, email address, and phone numbers. Eventually we plan to upgrade to the next version of Social Communities so we will be able to add in profiles like bios, past experience, education, etc.”
The social intranet site went live for all contributors in February 2010. “Being able to find information and comment on it rather than trying to track somebody down, and centralizing those discussions for everybody to find is probably the biggest benefit,” says Otten.
Future expectations
Momentive hopes this site will offer even greater visibility and accessibility to internal knowledge. “We want to show more of a mashup of relationships instead of simply mimicking the communities that are already in Collaboration, Vignette Edition that have similar topics, spread apart. We want to try to bring the information together so people will have better visibility on how these different projects relate to each other,” says Otten.
“We also want to try to cut down on the amount of repetition in emails. Our hope is that over time people will get used to seeing these portal pages and understand that this is a source of information to go to instead of sending around an email when they’re looking for information,” adds Otten.
The system should offer Momentive an easier on-boarding process, as Otten explains, “If we bring on a new scientist or if we transfer somebody to a different department that they're not familiar with, our hope is that they will know ahead of time that they can easily go to one place to find information and the key contacts who run that business function. They’ll find the training documentation and discussions related to certain projects without having to pick up the phone or send an email.”
Their most immediate plans are to use the technology portal as a template for other global functions such as IT, HR, sourcing, and finance. “These departments will basically use the same kind of layout and the same portlets. They might have a few custom tweaks to it, but overall it will be pretty similar,” says Otten. “We are also looking at making a distributor portal. This will cache to our Momentive.com site, which is primarily for customers. But we want to make an extranet site for the distributors so they can actually log in and get information that is specific to them but is behind our firewall, as well as be able to upload documentation to people in marketing, finance, or sourcing without having to do this through emails.”
About Xpediant Solutions
Xpediant Solutions is a leading provider of innovative, comprehensive, web based solutions to Global 2000 companies as well as small businesses in the US. Xpediant stands out in the web solutions marketplace by providing end-to-end solutions in rapid timeframes using a collection of proven, reusable software and design components. Xpediant is known for its innovative problem solving, aggressive timelines for delivery, affordable solutions, and total customer satisfaction. For more information, visit: http://www.xpediantsolutions.com/
|
|
|
