ENHANCING COLLABORATION AT ING GROUP

Knowledge Management Review, May/Jun 2007

KM has progressed from the belief that technology is the ultimate solution. But with use of social media tools becoming widespread, there's an opportunity for organizations to implement familiar systems at low cost and enable people to connect and collaborate as quickly and easily with their colleagues at work as they do outside of work. Here, in an extract from Melcrum's new report, Engaging employees with social media, we look at how ING Group is having great success with wikis.

How to use wikis to improve knowledge sharing

An interview with Marianne Nouwens, global intranet manager, ING Financial

With 113,000 employees across 50 countries, financial services company ING has good reason to pursue wikis as a way to enhance global collaboration and knowledge sharing.

After being piloted for a year since the end of 2005, the ING Wild officially launched in October 2006, with a central software tool on the intranet allowing users to upload and edit content. In the 15 months up to March 2007, the site had already gained 2,200 registered users and over 900 articles. The initial strategy goals of achieving at least 25 unique contributors per week has also been met, as has the number of unique visitors (400 per day).

Working for simplicity of use

To encourage participation among the non-techsavvy, the wild home page contains basic guidance and instruction:

* "2 minute QuickStart": A page that walks users through the process of contributing to the page, how to edit, and the key commands to use.

* "Golden Rules": Six core instructions to ensure compliance on content (see Fig 2, page 23).

Breaking down the content

From the wild home page, users are directed to create and edit content via a taxonomy of seven core portal areas:

* ING Organization

* Knowledge management

* Finance

* Geography

* IT

* Human resources

* Risk

* Sport

Within each portal, further content heading breakdowns allow users to find pages of relevance. So far, the use of the tool has spread into different areas. "Some people are using it in a project environment or for collaboration," says Marianne Nouwens, global intranet manager for ING. "Some simply use it as a social tagging tool or as a portal - keeping a page with links to useful pages around the site on a given topic."

The team has also received requests from some ING teams to create separate areas where they can develop project wilds, so accommodation has been made for these.

Measurable moderation is a selling point

Despite the presence of the Golden Rules, one key early lesson has been the need for overarching management of content. "As a financial services company, we have to ensure that what goes up there is appropriate," says Nouwens. "So one of our first moves was to ensure we have a 'co-editor' for each of these portal areas - someone who checks the content, to make sure that it's being used for the correct business purposes, not just to cross any boundaries."

This, plus the Golden Rules, meant that when Nouwens' team measured the impact of the wild (see below), they could report back that there had been no "incidents" of impropriety or risk to the organization. "In our industry, that's incredibly important to getting the go-ahead to continue this further," she says. "By being careful - by having moderators so that we could say to our executives that it had been shown to pose no risk - we take away the one potential major challenge to its continuation."

Measuring impact and employee needs

Until now, there has been no defined long-term strategy for the wild - and this is one area Nouwens would suggest is a positive. "My advice to anyone considering starting this is to just go for it. Get it up and running with a pilot, learn how its being used or misused, then measure after a few months to inform a more structured for ward-thinking strategy."

In line with this, after a year of trial and three months of official use, the corporate communications and affairs team ran a survey of employees in January 2007, to gauge take-up, usefulness, and impact. (All registered users were sent a print survey; and those accessing the site as "readers" were given a pop-up box, with a link to a web version of the survey.)

Feedback

Two core pieces of feedback came back from employees that will now inform the development of a full-scale social media strategy:

1. More recognition: In the survey, 40 percent of those who had registered for the site felt that the lack of clarity around the wild's usefulness, enterprise-wide, meant that there was as yet precious little recognition of their contribution to it. It's a valuable lesson: The site may "look" successful through use, but if the users' managers don't appreciate that, the compulsion to be active on there can quicldy the off again. "Some people spend a lot of time using the wild, putting information up there for others to use and sharing knowledge around the group. Yet, to a lot of managers who don't understand what it is, that can seem irrelevant. So we need to push out the message that collaborating via the wild is something that should be rewarded and recognized, otherwise we'll lose the momentum of our regular users."