GE’s Colab Brings Good Things to the Company

How can a company as large and spread out as GE get its employees to quickly connect with who they need, find internal expertise and share knowledge?

This process is, in fact, well underway through GE’s implementation of a social network it calls GE Colab. The platform was introduced to the company this past January and has already been utilized by 115,000 employees across the world. It attracts about 1,000 new users every few days.

One of the key people vital in making this happen was Ron Utterbeck, the CIO for GE Corporate and the Advanced Manufacturing Software Technology Center in Michigan. Utterbeck began GE Colab by strategically introducing it to the firm’s already known “power users” as a way to speed word of mouth around the enterprise and encourage early high levels of activity. He and his team then found that the best way to further increase quick growth was to make it simple to get feedback and suggestions from the early users and add desired new functionality — this then spurred even more users and activity.

In an interview with MIT Sloan Management Review contributing editor Robert Berkman, Utterbeck describes the key elements of how Colab works, including how it is breaking down corporate silos — functional, geographic and even generational — why the network gets such a high level of activity and his view on the contentious matter of measurement and ROI.

Can you first briefly describe what your social network, the GE Colab, is and how it works?

Yes. We’re harnessing the power of about 115,000 brains right now. The way we built Colab is that we leveraged a base product, and then we extended the heck out of it. And we’ve done it via APIs, so we can swap stuff in and out pretty easily.

At its core, we have is a section that’s called Stream. It’s similar to Facebook in that when you first log in to Facebook you can see the activity from all your friends, and that’s pretty much how Stream looks. You can see all the groups that you’ve joined. You can see the activity. You can see the activity of people you were following — what they’ve been posting, what they’ve been saying, where they are. And added to that we have a file-sharing capability.

Great. So what was your initial goal in terms of why you launched this? What problem did you feel you needed to solve?

The first was that our employees were inundated with collaboration tools that were seemingly not connected to each other. So, you had email. You had telephone. You had video. You had chat capabilities. What we wanted to do was bring those together into a platform.

So you had so many of these tools that people were finding it unwieldy and just a little bit too confusing to deal with which one to use when?

That’s exactly it. Or they didn’t even know about some of them. They only knew what was in their group.

The other aspect is that people started to use different tools. So we would have some people who wanted to use Yammer, while other people wanted to use other social networking sites. It was a question of how do we start to drive some consistency as well.

There’s another element, too. We’re a pretty collaborative culture to begin with. But some of our challenges, as we’re global, is how do you connect people? How do we make it so tghat you can search and get the right skill sets very easily? How do you make GE a lot smaller of a place? How do you have a virtual water cooler?

And when you decided to bring in GE Colab, did you have to pick one area to start? Was there any kind of strategic thinking in terms of how to begin it?

Yes. We rolled it out to our power users. We didn’t focus on a function — the functionality that is introduced is needed by every function.

What we were trying to do is get that user adoption right off the bat. What was most important was that we had people that started to use it and started to drive traffic to it and to really taste it, and then people would come back for more.

We really sought out the most experimental people in the different functions, and seeded it with them and then got their feedback.

The other thing that’s been very helpful with this platform is that we didn’t wait until it was 100%. We launched it knowing that it was good enough to get people to start moving on it, and then we started to get feedback. We had easy feedback mechanisms from our employees and our users that are using it. And then we incorporated that feedback into quick releases.

As the group functionality grew and public groups started to grow, that’s when a lot more of our senior leaders started to run it by their teams and then the adoption just continued. It’s fascinating because we track how people are using it, and when we add new functionality the usage just spikes on up. We have nearly 115,000 people using this platform today, from zero in January.

What extra benefits are you discovering from this new kind of collaboration?

We’re solving problems faster. When you belong to these groups and you can see how people are saying, “Hey, I got this problem,” literally, within minutes, three or four people comment on it and say, “Have you tried this? What about this?” People are connecting, finding the people they need. Like, “I need a compliance officer in India, I have this issue that I need to bounce off of somebody.” Boom. Right off the bat, it brings them there.

I have some stats that are interesting too: one in three of the connections that we have on the site are across functions. One in four is across geographies, whether between North America and Asia, Europe, South America. And one in five is across our business units.

Give us an example of where you think the network really came through.

Oh, I’ve got lots of them. One of the interesting capabilities that we have is to consider that you share files with your colleagues and typically you share a file either via email or on a file server or on a USB drive. That works great, but what happens when two months down the road somebody else stumbles across that file? They don’t know the context in which it was built. They don’t know what the dialog was, what decisions it was driving.

So, I can put a file out there in this new system, and I can include the context. Like, I’ll have a note that says, “Hey, Deia, here’s the file for a meeting. Here are the main points that we need to go through,” and then Deia can comment on it, and other people can comment on it. And so not only does the file live in the system, but all the conversation and the context that it was created under lives there, too.

That’s a great feature.

Yeah. Then we bring all these tools together. So, if you were on GE Colab right now, you’d be able to see that I’m online, and literally within one click you’d be able to start a chat session with me. You’d be able to start a video call with me. You’d be able to get my phone number.

One area that hasn’t caught on right now but is going to go like wildfire over the next year is an app we’ve instituted that brings purchase orders to the right staff person to approve with a click, and avoids having to go through the separate purchasing system.

We’re also leveraging the application functionality as a way to bring other stuff on in. So I can get my Facebook account through a Facebook application. We use Facebook’s APIs, and are able to bring that application on in. At LinkedIn, the same thing, and Chatter for Salesforce. If I’m a salesperson, and I’m talking with my customers, well, I have an app that brings that on in, too. It gives everyone that seamless experience.

And we’ve wrapped this all with a ton of search capabilities. In the past, we’ve tried a way that says, “Deia is a communicator and she has these skillsets,” but she would have to self-identify those skill sets. It turns out that wasn’t as effective as it could be.

Now, while we still allow people to do that, we’re actually a little bit smarter. We can tell that we know Deia’s a communicator because she works in this function. We know that Deia is on this distribution list with Michelle and Mary and Sam, which means a good possibility that Michelle, Mary and Sam have something to do with communications as well. We know who they interact with, and we use that to recommend to people who they should be friends with or follow, if you will.

We literally take all this data, we put it through a Hadoop cluster, and then are able to make sense out of this data, so that we can find people quicker. And it goes a step further: if Mary’s in compliance and she posts something, when I search for documents, for information, on a particular compliance topic, if she posted it and I have access to it and it’s relevant, it’ll come up even though I have no connection to Mary whatsoever.

Can you speak a little bit about whether you feel any kind of measurement or ROI is important in this initiative?

We haven’t tried to come up with an ROI. Haven’t wasted a moment’s notice even thinking about it. But we do track. We track usage, adoption, how people are using the system, what their connections are.

The biggest thing about usage is that no one in this corporation has to use this platform to get their job done. It’s not a system that people have to go to, but people still come back every single day. They come back because it makes their job easier, because they’re getting value out of it. Going and spending money on ROI would be, honesty, in my opinion, just a waste of money because your true value of this is people are coming back.

Do you see a next step where you’d like to see this go?

Right now what we’re doing is combining functions and features. The one that I think’s going to take off next is really this app, building these small windows on into a business process where you don’t have to log on into the complete system, when all I do is a small portion of the process.

It sounds like rolling the functionality that people needed was key, but how did you find out what people needed?

On either side of every screen there’s a small little feedback link. People can click on that feedback and it opens up a short little form that says, “Here’s the functionality. What do you like? What do you not like?” and we capture every bit of feedback that comes on in. We categorize it, and have a process where we evaluate how valuable would it be to the organization and how much work it would be, and then that’s how it gets slated on into our release cycle.

Was this initiative a high priority on GE’s list of objectives and goals for the year? Is that how it got sort of the right amount of attention and support that it needed?

I would say it wasn’t high priority. It was a priority. It was a priority of our CIO, Charlene Begley. And it had amazing support from our chairman and CEO, Jeff Immelt.

We talked a lot about this internal collaboration tool and you touched a little bit on the external collaboration things that you’re doing. Is there any integration between the two? And do you use any of the external social data to sort of inform any of GE’s strategies?

Yes. For example, we use Chatter with a lot of our customers. We get information from consumers there that goes on into product information and future product designs from a feature and how people like it or they don’t like it. Those would be two aspects of integration.

Is that integrated with the GE Colab?

Today, that is not integrated with GE Colab. But it’s one of the things that we’re working on with our services council — how we provide services for our products. Do we integrate that on into GE Colab?

We’ve got devices that are out there talking and, ultimately, what they end up doing is just communicating a different stream of information. So, if fits right on into this platform very nicely.

Are there certain people within the organization who are allowed to interact externally on the social networks? Or can almost anyone do it? Is there any training that people have to go through?

We do it in a number of our different businesses and have a huge GE-wide brand presence on many of the major social channels as well, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram. One GE example that pops to mind for me is from GE Appliances. What we’ve learned with Appliances is that it really does take a little bit of special training because you don’t want to barge on in to someone’s conversation if you haven’t been invited in. So, instead of just trying to come on in there and solve the issue, we do have people who are trained to kind of first ask, “Hey, do you mind, I’m so-and-so from GE. I think I can help you. Would you mind if I. . .” type of stuff. There’s an art to it, and there’s a lot more training that’s needed than just taking a normal customer service rep and turning them loose.

Is there any sort of standard training that everyone within GE has to take that says, “here are the things about social”?

We believe social media and online communities can be a great way for GE employees to share expertise and perspectives with their family, friends, colleagues, customers or potential employees around the globe or down the street. But it’s important to know what should or should not be shared. We teach them the basics and how to use good judgment.

Finally, Ron, is there anything else that we didn’t ask that you think is important to mention?

Here’s what didn’t come up, but I think is vitally important: Outside of the workplace, I hang with my generation in Facebook. You hang with your generation. And my niece hangs with hers. And for the most part, that’s just fine and dandy.

However, in a workplace we actually need those generations to interact. Not only do we need it, we encourage it. We want to foster it because that’s where people work together.