Socializing Across the Enterprise: Our Personal Journey With ESN

Socializing Across the Enterprise:
Our Personal Journey

Dr. Pehong Chen
Founder & CEO, BroadVision

December 2009

Introduction

My name is Pehong Chen, Founder and CEO of BroadVision. I would like to share
with you our Company’s transformational experience in adopting a new business
paradigm and e-business platform over the last ten months, called Enterprise Social
Networks (ESN). As we continue to drive this initiative forward, we thought that
we’d share this status report with you, because we know that many organizations
around the world are keenly interested in this topic, and could benefit from the
lessons we have learned so far.

Consumer Social Media and Enterprise Social Networks

First let’s lay some groundwork. Many forms of consumer social media (CSM) have
become hugely successful in recent years. However, there are some crucial
differences between CSM and ESN (Fig 1). Here is a simple way to analyze and
differentiate the two.

Fig 1. Different Social Platforms for Different Purposes: Consumer vs. Business

CSM is about individuals getting connected for either personal leisure such as
entertainment or gaming online, or to maintain personal relationships. These are
consumer facing Internet applications, and we are all very familiar with the
associated brand names and the services they provide. Enterprises should consider
adopting a CSM strategy in order to establish their presence at places such as
Facebook or LinkedIn for branding or lead generation purposes.

Socializing Across the Enterprise 1
Copyright © 2009 BroadVision, Inc. All rights reserved.

ESN, on the other hand, is about enterprises harnessing the same kind of social
fabric, but among its own constituents so as to foster better team collaboration,
facilitate more effective knowledge sharing, or to forge vibrant self-service
communities among your customers. All these applications can be deployed across
an enterprise’s entire intranet, extranet and Internet ecosystem, which is why
many experts are now advocating that beyond a CSM strategy, every organization
and every company must also establish its own ENS platform so as to attain higher
enterprise performance excellence.

“ESN is a platform which empowers
individuals, teams, and companies to develop
work and business relationships.”
In other words, if we analyze social networking participants and their relationships,
CSM is about individuals maintaining relationships at a personal level, whereas ESN
is a platform that empowers individuals, teams, and companies to develop work
and business relationships.

To summarize, socializing across the enterprise is about an organization (including
business, government or NGO, non-profit, school, association, etc.) leveraging the
ESN to enable all its constituencies to more effectively connect, communicate, and
collaborate with each other. The end goal isn’t fun or entertainment, as CSM
typically is, but to excel in teamwork and performance, so as to become a stronger
organization.

What we have observed so far is that most major corporations have allocated
funding for a “digital marketing” strategy to do branding and lead-gen on various
CSM sites, but with a lack of understanding, let alone budget, for implementing an
ESN strategy and solution. We hope this report will stimulate more awareness
about the value ESN can bring to your organization.

BroadVision and Clearvale

Established in 1993 and IPO in 1996, BroadVision has been an e-business pioneer
from the outset and offers four main product lines to address an enterprise’s e-
business needs, including the new Clearvale enterprise social network solutions. We
maintain a worldwide footprint and ecosystem. Although we are just a medium
sized business today with a workforce of approximately 300 people, we operate
across more than 20 countries and geographies around the world, serving several
thousand enterprise customers and partners. Every month there are more than 50
million unique visitors coming to the e-business web sites powered by BroadVision.
We have operated at a very efficient level over the last few years, generating more
than 25% average annual profit margin. Clearvale, our newest enterprise social


network solution, has been gaining tremendous momentum over the past few
months. In fact, since its launch less than six months ago, it has seen remarkable
growth, exceeding 3,000 networks already in this period, which is truly exciting.

“Every month there are more than 50 million
unique visitors coming to the e-business web
sites powered by BroadVision. We have
operated at a very efficient level over the last
few years, generating more than 25% average
annual profit margin.”
Recapping enterprise e-business’s entire evolutionary path over the past 15 years
(Fig. 2), Web 1.0 was essentially about enterprises being able to publish their own
message/content and publicize their own brand in a one-to-many fashion. Here,
they typically worked under a more structured collaboration paradigm and business
processes. It didn’t take long for users to be bogged down by the perils of content
explosion, thus ushering in “Web 1.5” as the next generation platform based on
personalization with rule-based matching and faster/smarter search services. As a
result, a new one-to-one communications paradigm emerged to support a number
of semi-structured collaboration and business processes.

Fig. 2 The Evolution of Enterprise E-Business


With the emergence of Web 2.0 and ESN, everyone in the enterprise is now able to
establish relationships, build communities, and socialize with each other under a
many-to-many model. Company-generated content now takes a backseat, replaced
with user-generated content. Business processes can now be pushed to the “edge,”
enabling ad-hoc self-service and unstructured collaboration that can be key
catalysts to creative thinking and innovations. The issue here isn’t that the new
generation is erasing the last; rather, we are now able to consolidate and integrate
these different paradigms together, especially from someone like BroadVision who
has been there from the very beginning and every step of the way since.

Clearvale’s data model anchors on a triangular structure of workspaces, people, and
content, from which a multitude of relationships can be established both within and
across these three entities (Fig 3). The primary benefit of this holistic approach is
that it crystallizes socializing across the enterprise with a great deal of simplicity
and clarity.

Fig 3. The Inter-Relationships between Workspace, Content and People

Most industry experts now agree that any Enterprise 2.0 solution must employ two
key transformations to stay relevant to the next generation of corporate users:

• Consumerization of the enterprise. Remake traditionally arcane and
complex enterprise systems and processes, transforming them into Web 2.0
tools as straightforward to assemble, deploy, and use as many CSM services
that we have all grown to love as a consumer. It also means fully embracing
“cloud computing” to empower widespread adoption across your enterprise
ecosystem by anyone, from anywhere, at anytime with minimal to zero IT
overhead, while preserving tight security and stringent access control that
are core to any enterprise applications.


• Enterprization of the consumer. Inevitably, many successful CSM business
models are finding their ways into the enterprise. For instance, the
preponderance of Clearvale’s core services is advertiser-sponsored, hence
free of charge for the enterprise. In addition, premium services are offered
flexibly on a pay-per-use basis, relieving the enterprise from overpaying
upfront licenses it could never consume, which most organizations have had
to commit to regularly. These new business models are extremely beneficial
to the enterprise, which can now encourage the ESN adoption at a grassroots
level based on a bottom-up approach, enabling it to contain business risks
and shorten its time to deployment.

I have been with the IT industry for 20+ years as both a buyer and a seller, and
I’ve always wondered why enterprise-level products and services had to be so
expensive to acquire yet so difficult to implement or deploy. By incorporating and
harnessing the duality of consumerization (i.e., Solutions 2.0) and enterprization
(i.e., Business Models 2.0) as its core value proposition, Clearvale is on a mission to
change all that, offering the enterprise compelling business value and
unprecedented upside potential.

Clearvale also represents a productivity revolution akin to desktop publishing in the
1980s. Prior to the PC, it was extremely expensive and time-consuming to publish a
professionally printed document. Personal computers, high-quality/low-cost
printers, and desktop publishing tools revolutionized all that. I remember back then
when finally I was able to do it all by myself, i.e., the sense of being “in control” of
my own destiny, was so liberating and exuberating — it was an incredible feeling.

“With the advent of an ESN platform like
Clearvale, every one of us as an enterprise-
level ‘consumer’ can now easily assemble,
deploy, and utilize highly powerful cyber
workspaces such as networks, communities,
relationships, etc. to boost our job
performance and output — with little effort
and at very low cost.”
A new revolution (Fig 4) is starting to take place in the Web collaboration front,
which will continue over the next decade as more and more organizations adopt
ESN so as to better communicate and collaborate amongst and with all their
constituencies across the entire enterprise ecosystem. Building e-business websites
also used to be very expensive and cumbersome endeavors (in fact, orders of
magnitude more so than the pre-PC document publishing). With the advent of an


ESN platform like Clearvale, every one of us as an enterprise-level “consumer” can
now easily assemble, deploy, and utilize highly powerful cyber workspaces such as
networks, communities, relationships, etc. to boost our job performance and output
— with little effort and at very low cost. Our experience so far has confirmed that it
is truly quite a revelation, revolution, and indeed transformation for our company
and all our people.

Fig 4. Enterprise Cultural Transformation: from Need to Know to Need to Share

At the end of the day, ESN is about a culture change and paradigm shift. Adopting
it turned out to be a lot harder than we first thought, even for a company like
BroadVision who has been pioneering e-business since the dawn of the worldwide
web. Consistent with reports from other ESN early adopters, we have found it to be
a race of jumping through hurdles after hurdles. The good news is that having been
on this journey for the past ten months, we have been able to identify seven
important habits that are crucial to overcoming these hurdles in order to make the
ESN adoption successful. Here, we would like to share that learning experience with
you.


Adopting ESN

There have been numerous reports of ESN deployments dying on the vine after a
short time (3-6 months), raising the question as to why is this so difficult?
Experience suggests that this is because ESN adoption involves lots of crucial
changes in our work habits, both individually and as an organization, which are
always very challenging. For example, at BroadVision we found the following
changes became apparent.

First, roles change. In the classic Web 1.0 days, we had IT building the web site,
marketing publishing content, and the remaining 99% of the Company acting as
end users. In an ESN social networking world, we are encouraging everyone to take
on a combined role of being a site builder, content publisher and end user, which of
course is quite challenging.

Then there is the enterprise mindset of worrying about abusive or offensive
content, or other security issues, now that all of this is serviced over the cloud.
While these concerns are often groundless, there is still the need for some form of
governance or oversight to ensure individuals or teams do not pick up anti-social
tendencies.

Finally, there is the issue of transitioning an organization’s management culture
from a “need to know” to a “need to share” basis. After three decades of PC
proliferation, email has become the predominant communication and collaboration
platform for essentially every enterprise in the world. It also mirrors the
traditionally hierarchical management paradigm, reflecting a need-to-know, one-to-
many, store-and-forward communications model. As we have all experienced, such
a model typically winds up being a series of disparate threads and silos — so much
so that very quickly any sense of history or wider context of knowledge becomes
almost impossible to ascertain.

“With ESN and cloud computing, we can begin
to shift to a more robust need-to-share, many-
to-many, push-and-pull paradigm . . . .”
With ESN and cloud computing, we can begin to shift to a more robust need-to-
share, many-to-many, push-and-pull paradigm as the default mode of
communication. With an ESN solution like Clearvale, this can be easily
accomplished by utilizing its consolidated interaction and collaboration spaces
across various user-defined relationships and communities. While we recognize that
effecting such a cultural change is easier said than done as all old habits like email


dependency die hard, it is possible to augment how email communication occurs, as
we have observed in our own case, which we will discuss in more detail later.

Seven Habits for Successful ESN Adoption

Over at BroadVision, ten months into Clearvale, we have developed seven key
habits that we think can be put in practice to resolve and overcome the ESN
adoption hurdles. So let’s look at this list (Fig 5).

Fig 5. Seven Habits for Successful Business Social Networking

First is a mandate. Whether as a CEO or a team leader at the grassroots level, if
you’re convinced that an ESN such as Clearvale can help, you should make your
determination and commitment very clear. Then you need a clear attainable
strategy with well-defined goals. Third, you must set expectations - starting low but
keeping your finger on the pulse all the time through self-assessment, surveys and
polls. Next is contribution. Perhaps most importantly, you want to enlist your
opinion leaders and key knowledge managers to become anchor tenants within your
network, also establishing some communities ahead of time with well populated
content, and then in the first several months you want to run this on an editorial
calendar basis, so that you have enough fresh and rich content to draw people
back.


After that, you should promote full participation—the fifth habit. What we have
found to be most effective is to offer people the ability to track what they are doing
with activity and participation for people to use this in as a creative a way as
possible. One of the most effective ways we have found is through a sixth habit,
competition. By nature, professionals and the teams they form are competitive, so
to allow them to be able to accrue activity points through some reward systems is
very effective. Last, but not least, if you just keep at it, and learn from your own
mistakes, eventually you will persevere.

Let’s now consider these points in more detail.

1. Mandate

BroadVision is in an industry (enterprise software) going through huge changes—
transformation, consolidation, new paradigms, and fresh competition—so we need
to change no matter what in order to cope. This means having to be able to do
more with less through a much more distributed global footprint, so as to serve our
customers everywhere at a much more affordable cost. Specifically, due to China’s
incredible growth potential, we have expanded our presence there significantly in
recent years, which now includes nearly half of our workforce, with the rest
spreading across 20+ major countries and regions across the globe.

In the meantime, Clearvale is gaining huge momentum, and we have to practice
our own religion to stay ahead of the curve. So our management team got together
at the beginning of this year and reached a consensus that we need to embrace and
deploy Clearvale within the Company to anyone, anytime, anywhere. We went live
in March 2009, and everyone including I, as the CEO, has been active on it
everyday since.

In terms of implementing the mandate, we recommend that there be a “Chief
Clearvale Officer,” or CCO, who acts as both the editor-in-chief and main strategy
enforcer for each network. The person needs to be a senior executive, respected in
the organization, and offer incentives to drive this forward persistently. In fact,
sometimes it can require several co-CCO’s to handle the workload and to
complement each other’s skills and time commitments, especially when dealing
with a very large organization and network. In our case, I personally acted as a
CCO, working closely with our HR director and several other executives as co-
CCO’s, which has worked out very well.

What happens if your ESN is initiated at a grassroots level where there is no
corporate or senior management mandate? Do not despair. Create your own mini-
mandate within your small workgroup; develop your own use cases and success
stories first, then virally invite other groups to join your network. When the CEO or
senior management eventually catches on, you will be a big hero.


2. Strategy

Our strategy is very simple. We asked every department in the Company to come
up with a game plan by creating use cases across our entire ecosystem of intranet,
extranet, and Internet. Sales and HR came up with their own use cases for an
intranet type of deployment; R&D and F&A came up with extranet use cases
involving our development out-sourcing partners, auditors, and outside counsels;
our Support and Marketing organizations came up with extranet and Internet use
cases for customers and outbound prospecting, respectively.

As a result, we created four major Enterprise 2.0 networks within Clearvale: our
new 2.0 intranet; a new 2.0 partner extranet; and then two other networks for our
Clearvale customers and for our Marketing efforts (Fig 6). We then looked at the
capabilities within Clearvale of various workspaces, as well as the types of
collaboration supported by all the available tools and widgets, from which we
identified clearly what might be needed for each use case scenario. For example,
different network scenarios require different ESN configurations and functionality –
e.g. sales ‘war rooms’; ‘cyber water cooler’ for HR and company culture building; an
Ideas Lab for idea creation and innovative thinking; and in F&A – a Global
Governance network. This results in very tailored community- centric micro-
websites—each meeting the needs of the community—while being quickly
configured through one platform (Clearvale) by end-users themselves on the fly
and without bothering IT at all.

Fig 6. Examples of Enterprise 2.0 Business Use Cases Implemented in Clearvale


3. Expectations

We wanted to start low and aim high. We believe very much in keeping our fingers
on the pulse and undertake full participatory surveys once a month with questions
in three areas: participation, competence and confidence. If we can achieve 80%
positive feedback within 6 months we will be very happy. We started the surveys in
July and we’re very satisfied with the results so far, which we discuss in more detail
below. This is all done in a Clearvale community called user surveys, which forms
an integral part of the BroadVision Connect (intranet 2.0) network.

4. Contribution

With regard to contribution, we have built very compelling content from the
network home page, through communities, all the way deep down into individual
and all types of content pages (Fig 7). The main draws have been featured blogs
contributed by “knowledge managers” from across the globe and regional event
photo galleries. We also showcase most active members and communities, opinion
polls, management-by-objectives (MBO) plans, news and essentials, e-learning
videos, tweeting, etc. All these widgets, plus many more, can be changed
dynamically and as frequently as necessary. We also figured out, although not
initially, the value of setting up anchor community categories top-down, ending up
with four at the top level—corporate, departmental, regional, and social—so as to
avoid our rapidly growing communities becoming too difficult to track. Finally,
running this like clockwork on a calendar basis also is very critical for keeping the
content fresh.

Fig 7. Socializing Across the Enterprise: Examples of Contributed Content


5. Participation

The next key habit is to encourage full and proactive participation from every
member of the organization within your ESN. Of course we cannot expect people to
do things if they do not understand what is in it for them. Here, we took a three-
pronged approach at BroadVision: the “carrot,” the “stick,” and the “donut”. In the
“carrot,” we want people to understand and accept that ultimately this is about
gaining productivity, improving performance, and receiving very tangible rewards.
As a result, they can work faster due to better productivity, smarter because of
higher performance, and happier for getting tangible rewards.

The “stick” is really just a gentle nudge. In order to be able to participate in their
MBOs so as to receive bonuses, they have to come to Clearvale to utilize a tool
called TeamWork for aligning and tracking their goals, tasks, and activates. In
addition, all our pertinent documents are stored using another tool called
DocuVault, providing easy document sharing and versioning over the cloud. We also
encourage a new way of using email called content-free email—essentially using it
as a notification tool, pointing people back to the consolidated knowledge base on
Clearvale.

“The upshot of all this is that all members
know where they stand with respect to
participation, thereby encouraging
improvement at both individual and team
levels.”
Finally in terms of the “donut,” we provide KPI and KUI, for key participation index
and key utilization index, respectively, to help people understand where they are in
terms of relationships, memberships, and authorships that they are maintaining, as
well as their visits, page views, most frequently searched keywords, and other
crucial statistics from a business intelligence standpoint. The upshot of all this is
that all members know where they stand with respect to participation, thereby
encouraging improvement at both individual and team levels.

As a more specific example, the global “war room” is one of the popular use cases
in our BroadVision Connect intranet network (Fig. 8) – where we plan our go-to
market strategy and track our MBOs, with every member of the management team
and their team members all participating in this community, and manage all our
documents in a centralized vault. Managers post all their required learning and
additional training materials here; members do real time planning and
brainstorming through message boards, twittering, chatting, etc. and coordinate
and schedule meetings and events all together within the war room. The key here is


that I actually created several communities like this for our various product lines
without any help from IT.

Fig 8. Global ‘War Room’ for Managing Sales as part of Enterprise 2.0

Drilling down even further, we find that by using TeamWork to track MBOs, a
manager can layout the entire plan for the period and be able to delegate subgoals
and tasks to team members. Everyone can keep track of their progress on a weekly
basis and use dashboards to compare and evaluate status against the plan, and
finally be able to assign bonuses accordingly on a timely and accurate basis.

6. Competition

To make all of this competitive and fun, we leverage a capability in Clearvale called
Clearvale Activity Points (CAPs), which corresponds largely to everyone’s KPI.
Members can find out what their CAPs are for the week, month, or on a lifetime
basis from their profile page. They can also see how they are stacking up against
other members within their community or network. On top of that, over the last few
months we have created some highly competitive and fun awards called the
Clearvale ESN Achievement (CESNA) Awards with two main categories. The MVP
category is given to the most active individuals with the highest lifetime CAPs. The
Dream Team category is given to teams that can come up with the most innovative
use cases for Clearvale.


The Dream Team competition is especially worthy of some attention, as it is an
excellent showcase for team collaboration. Excluding eStaff members (my direct
reports) who form the “judging panel,” our global workforce is divided into 20+
teams of ten members each across departmental and geographical boundaries, as
well as administrative and management hierarchies for this competition. The
mission is to come up with best vertical industry use cases for Clearvale. Our goals,
which are much broader than just winning these awards per se, include the
following:

1. “Learning-by-doing” employee training;
2. Facilitate team-building/teamwork; nurture future leaders;
3. Build camaraderie across departments/geographies;
4. Foster innovative thinking;
5. Enrich ESN knowledge amongst all employees;
6. Promote Clearvale application/utilization;
7. Add new vertical use cases into sales arsenal;
8. Reward both individual and team achievements.

All teams are self-governed, electing their own team leads and selecting their own
vertical industry focus. Each team then must research and identify key pain points
in that industry, come up with a solution, and implement it via one or more
Clearvale networks. The whole project is to be completed within two months during
which everyone is to work on it as a “side job.” They are given best practice
guidelines, tutorials, and a standard template with which to construct and present
their business use cases.

All this information, plus other pertinent resources for the competition, resides in
our main intranet BVSNC’s CESNA Resource Center community, which also serves
as a clearinghouse and self-service helpdesk for everyone. The teams are required
to set up their respective private communities in BVSNC to conduct their project
planning, collaboration, and tracking. In the final showdown, all teams must
present their use cases and demos as recorded videos that are linked to a “ballot
widget” within the Resource Center, so as to be reviewed and voted on
conveniently by the judging panel as well as all employees worldwide. The final
rankings are determined by 50% judging panel votes; 30% popular votes; 20%
team composite CAPs. Prizes: each member of the top three teams receives a cash
reward of USD $2,000, $1,000, and $500, respectively.

“The CESNA Awards competition turned out to
be a resounding success.”
The CESNA Awards competition turned out to be a resounding success. Only one
team had to withdraw at the last moment due to poor coordination; all other teams
completed their projects on time and everyone did a fantastic job (Fig 9). Across
the board, we got convincing business use cases and impressive presentations,


causing most people to have a real tough time casting their votes. An “exit poll”
accompanying the ballots shows that everyone enjoyed the experience and agreed
that we’ve attained most of the 8 CESNA goals, with (1), (7), and (4) being
perceived as the top three achievements.

“In one fell swoop, we are able to train all our
employees on a brand new product by just
turning them loose on it . . . .”
So why is this such a big deal? Well, I must admit that in my two decades of
business career as a CEO, this is the first time I am able to witness how a simple
concept like CESNA can energize an entire company—I am totally blown away. In
one fell swoop, we are able to train all our employees on a brand new product by
just turning them loose on it, add valuable assets in vertical business use cases to
our sales arsenal, and get everyone’s creative juices flowing with a lot of innovative
ideas—just to name the top three accomplishments. In doing so, it also turned a
number of skeptics into staunch believers and supporters. Many, especially those
working at isolated home offices or in far-flung remote locations, also feel that
they’ve never been so close to the company and to their colleagues elsewhere, or
to be able to so directly influence and contribute to the company’s product
direction. Of course, logistically, we would not have been able to pull this off so
easily without our Clearvale ESN platform serving as the command and control
centre for all the critical coordination, communication, and collaboration behind this
global competition. It is truly amazing!

Fig 9. One of the CESNA Award Finalists - Business Social Travel Network Use Case


Most youngsters today are obsessed with MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online
Role-Playing Games) — the first wave of the consumer social phenomenon. I
remember in their high school days, my son and his friends would synchronize their
alarm clocks to wake up in the middle of the night to play MMORPG for a couple of
hours before returning to bed (to avoid getting caught by parents who said that
they’re wasting too much time on games). Funny thing is the exact same behavior
has been reincarnated as a second wave at social sites like KaiXinWang (开心网),
the leading CSM destination in China—only this time the players jumping out of bed
in the middle of the night are the parents, grownups worrying about their vegetable
gardens getting raided by neighbors or vice versa. Go figure!

My point is this: if the combination of games with socialization and competition with
your friends and colleagues can become such a compelling and powerful driver for
working professionals to be willing to give up precious sleep, why not channel all
that positive energy into something that can generate very tangible benefits for
everyone, both individually and as an organization. And that was the primary
motivation behind our design for CESNA—at least as our first experiment. With one
success under our belt, we’ve got lots of new ideas on how to improve our
“enterprise game theory,” including leveraging more of our CAPs as a stimulus, or
“virtual currency,” as is common to all MMORPG, to be applied to very meaningful
productivity and performance related work scenarios. We will have more to share
with you about this in the future.

So here is the bottom line: we believe competition in the form of gaming, call it
EMORPG (for “enterprise MORPG”), is a key ingredient to stimulate participation
and, ultimately, your successful ESN adoption. Yet, when formulated correctly, it
may yield even greater collateral benefits that could really surprise you. We highly
recommend incorporating this “habit” into your Enterprise 2.0 transformation
playbook.

7. Perseverance

Like all things involving cultural change or paradigm shift, ESN adoption is one
about which some old clichés never get tired:

• If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, and try again;
• The glass is always half-full, not half-empty;
• The first ninety miles constitute only half of a hundred-mile journey.

If you have implemented the first six habits, the most important thing left is to
keep at it until you succeed. But this is non-trivial, because it is all too easy to give
up, as the doubters, cynics, skeptics, and the likes can bury your ESN alive.
Moreover, a hollow site without interesting user-created content would undermine
participation, self-destructing and degenerating the ESN into a downward spiral.


Even though BroadVision has been in e-business for a very long time and has a
vested interest in practicing what we preach in terms of ESN, it hasn’t been smooth
sailing for us at all. Initially it was very much touch and go, until we learned from
our own experience and synthesized these seven key habits. It is crucial that our
entire management team believes in what we’re doing, in those “clichés,” be able to
“hang tight,” and never give up. About halfway into this ten-month journey, things
began to turn around as more and more colleagues turned into “converts”. Indeed,
in recent months, everything seems to start trending in the right direction,
including member participation, content creation, community activities, etc.—
leading us to be very optimistic that we will soon be “crossing the chasm,” if not
already there. Ample evidence that our ESN adoption is succeeding can be found in
every corner of BVSNC, our Clearvale-based “Intranet 2.0.” To quote a couple of
unsolicited testimonials from employee blogs:

“…My personal perception is that communication has improved and
that we are all closer... I don't know whether it's a personal thing or if
it's the power of ESN, but I certainly feel more involved in what's
going on and more informed …” GJ, Field Marketing, EMEA

“… I think this kind of information will boost people’s morale in working
on the product. I am beginning to truly believe in the value of
openness that ESN can bring to a company...” PH, Engineering, HQ

We are now convinced that our ESN culture is here to stay, anchoring a key pillar
for the new BroadVision 2.0. Finally, let’s let the numbers do the talking. Here is a
small sample from our KPI/KUI statistics and monthly user survey results that you
might find interesting:

• With an enterprise ecosystem of approximately 300 people in our extended
workforce, serving several thousand customers and partners, our colleagues
have now voluntarily created over 250 communities inside our main BVSNC
intranet network (Fig 10).

• Over 85% of these communities are work related, 15% on a hobby or leisure
basis — a fairly healthy balance.

• Our surveys confirm the 80/20 rule, reflecting our goal that at least 80% of our
people wind up expressing a positive attitude with a fairly satisfied experience
about all things related to Clearvale ESN (Fig 11). Indeed, over the last few
surveys we have seen this heading the right way—whether in participation,
competence, or confidence.


Fig 10. Communities, Content and Activity Analytics

Fig 11. Ongoing Surveys Capture Community Feedback


Conclusion

We know it takes two to tango—like the popular TV show “Dancing with the Stars”
where in the case of deploying ESN the “stars” might be the organization or
management, and all our constituencies the “pros”—or perhaps it is really the other
way around. Regardless who the stars or pros might be, it takes the entire
enterprise to socialize, and in my opinion with a successful ESN deployment, the
real winner is the enterprise itself, in which every constituency across the
ecosystem will thrive and prosper.

Clearvale’s consumerization strategy has empowered enterprise end-users with the
ability and freedom to deploy ESN anywhere by anyone at anytime, with minimal to
zero IT overhead. The reverse is also true with our enterprization of the consumer
strategy—offering Clearvale essentially for free as a simple, affordable, and very
flexible business model. In short, it is now much less of a technical or cost issue
and all about culture and tradition. Changing one’s habits is extremely hard.
Therefore, adopting these seven new habits is absolutely crucial in making one’s
ESN successful.

From CEO and senior management all the way to the frontline workforce fighting in
the trenches, the key is for everyone to understand that although the journey of
transforming to Enterprise 2.0 can be challenging, it can be great fun and
rewarding too when executed well. As our own experience has indicated, once you
succeed in socializing across the enterprise, you will find that thousands of flowers
will bloom, and the resulting stronger organization and more productive and
innovative workforce can achieve goals far beyond anyone’s expectations.


About Dr. Pehong Chen

Dr. Pehong Chen is Chairman, President and CEO of
BroadVision, Inc. (NASDAQ: BVSN), which he founded in
May 1993. Headquartered in Redwood City, California,
with offices and operations in more than 20 other cities
around the world, BroadVision is an innovative provider
of online commerce and business social networking
solutions. For 16 years, BroadVision has helped
thousands of organizations around the globe to enable
mission-critical web initiatives and to grow profitably by
improving online business processes through invited
participation and social interaction.

Prior to starting BroadVision, he was Vice President of multimedia technology at
Sybase, responsible for the company’s interactive initiatives. He founded and was
President of Gain Technology, a leading supplier of multimedia software tools.
There, he pioneered multimedia as an enabling technology for a new generation of
business applications that engage end users and consumers in a process of
interaction and information exchange. Sybase, a leading supplier of database
software, acquired Gain in 1992 for over $100 million.

Dubbed “Master of the Universe” by BusinessWeek as one of the 25 most influential
people in e-business, Dr. Chen is an active participant of the Silicon Valley success
story. Having personally started and run two successful startup software companies
in the past 19 years, Dr. Chen has also been active in helping others do the same.
In 1993, he provided startup funding for Siebel Systems, a worldwide leader in
sales force automation software (acquired by Oracle). In addition to BroadVision,
Dr. Chen also serves as an independent director on the boards of Sina (NASDAQ:
SINA), the #1 Internet portal in China, and UFIDA (SSE: 600588), the largest
enterprise software company in China.

Dr. Chen is currently a Vice Chairman of the Committee of 100, a non-profit
organization dedicated to improving mutual understanding between the United
States and China through more dialogue and cooperation. He is also an adviser to
the College of Engineering, University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Chen received
his PhD from Berkeley, MS from Indiana University, and BS from National Taiwan
University, all in computer science. He is also a graduate of Stanford University’s
executive program in business and management.

Socializing Across the Enterprise

Socializing Across the Enterprise: Our Personal Journey With ESN

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