EMC to measure E20 ROI in NPD improvement

clipped from internetevolution.com

EMC is in its honeymoon period with social networking. “I think I have six to 12 months before I have to quantify hard savings, and I’m not sure how I’m going to do that,” Devanna says.

But he does have a few ideas. One metric is user adoption. EMC has about 10,000 wiki documents and 3,000 blogs across 150 topical communities on its Jive platform. Of its 38,000 employees globally, the platform has about 10,000 active users and another 15,000 lurkers who are watching conversations or consuming content but haven’t posted anything themselves, Devanna says.

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Devanna believes that social networking also will help EMC get new products to market faster. Before these apps were available, ideas for new products bounced around among a limited set of employees. Now they can be teed up on a platform with 25,000 pairs of eyeballs on it. The theory is that good ideas get validated and bad ideas get discarded more quickly, which leads to faster product development, he says. However, he admits that he has yet to prove this theory.

Devanna also may be able to point to one other return: The company launched the internal social apps to gain proficiency in creating external customer communities.