Enterprise 2.0 in action

Environmental Resources Management is one of the world’s leading providers of environmental consulting services, delivering innovative solutions for leading business and government clients, assisting its clients in tackling climate change and managing their environmental and related risks.
In 2006, ERM’s leaders recognised the need to improve global knowledge sharing and collaboration in order to meet a growing demand for both environmental consultancy services and clients’ need for more innovative solutions to their problems. ERM also wanted to recruit and retain talented individuals so as to remain competitive. ERM’s global knowledge sharing portal Minerva, was rolled out after a nine-month joint project between the company’s IT department and its Global Knowledge Sharing (KS) Team, running from September 2006 to 24th May 2007, when Minerva was launched.
From the outset, the Minerva project team believed that any global IT initiative must clearly support ERM’s business strategy and its objectives. With our knowledge of how technologies can transform businesses, organisation culture and employees’ ways of working, we strongly believed we must add value by opening up the minds of senior managers and consultants to enable them to ‘dream of the impossible’ and then explore how new technologies might make the dreams come true.

ERM’s knowledge management journey
Two months after its launch in May 2007, Minerva had already proven to be a successful global implementation. In a post-launch survey, our consultants told us that they “did not know Minerva would be able to offer so much more” and that “it has already exceeded their expectations”. Senior leaders highlighted that “Minerva has finally turned our vision into reality”. The CEO, Pete Regan, described the launch of Minerva as “hitting the Jackpot”. This section shares our nine-month knowldege management (KM) journey.
Over three months in late 2006, in-depth research was carried out to identify the issues that ERM employees were facing in being able to access information and expertise to support the sales effort, to deliver client work and to grow their careers within ERM. Over 1,000 narratives were gathered from colleagues based in 40 different countries. The results of this research helped to shape the design and implementation of Minerva.
After analysing the research findings, the Minerva project team identified the potential of using Web 2.0 technologies to develop a flexible intranet and collaboration platform, which can improve global internal communication; develop shared vision for the business strategy; support the consultants’ immediate needs to work collaboratively to serve our clients, while at the same time empowering business users by enabling them to design internal tools and systems to support evolving business requirements. Web 2.0 can transfer the power from the IT developers to the business users in designing tools/systems and thereby avoiding the building of a centralised one-size-fits-all solution.

Minerva's goal
Minerva is designed to improve operational excellence and to deliver its knowledge sharing vision: ‘We want everyone at ERM to be able to quickly tap into one another’s expertise; and access relevant information/documents; in order to provide the best solution for our clients and to be successful in growing our own careers.’
ERM recognises that with about 80 per cent of everyone’s knowledge stored in their mind, we need a system and organisation culture which enables good internal communications and enables ERMers to be easily connected with one another to serve our clients.
Minerva aims to achieve four objectives:

(1) To increase the social networking of staff worldwide by linking-up practitioners working in similar areas and to reduce the degree of separation felt by geographically dispersed staff;

(2) To leverage on employees’ collective knowledge and experience by making resources, tools, methodologies, proposals and documents accessible on a global basis;

(3) To improve cross-office collaboration to serve our global clients’ needs, including reducing the use of e-mails to support team collaboration;

(4) To support internal communications and integrate new hires into the organisation by making corporate resources and messages easily accessible.

Basic features
Minerva makes extensive use of Web 2.0 technologies to improve enterprise productivity. Its design is informed by Brenda Dervin’s ‘Sense-Making’ theory¹ with a set of alternative assumptions in thinking about users and how they create meaning from information:

Sense-making assumes that reality is sometimes orderly and sometimes chaotic. There is no objective reality out there (which can be separated from the employees);
Employees, with different background and experience, have to make sense of their day-to-day working lives, ie. to come up with their own ‘observations’ (or create their own meaning when they interact with information on the intranet);
Knowledge or information (defined as the sense being made or unmade) cannot be transmitted like water from one bucket to another;
Different employees may come up with different ‘observations’ and interpret the same piece of information on the intranet in different ways;
Very often, in large organisations, the people in power, such as senior managers, decide whose observations are preferred. For example, they decide what are considered ‘best practices’, how to interpret the company’s strategy. Employees’ voices, if different from those in power, are ignored or suppressed;
However, if an employee does not share the same meaning as the people in power, no matter how much a message is polished and how many times it is shared on the intranet, it will not create any impact. Employees will just ignore the message.

Minerva is designed to be a user-centred intranet with the belief that ‘employees can think for themselves’. It enables employees to co-create meaning and have genuine dialogue on a peer-to-peer level and with senior managers. We believe that by using Web 2.0 to engage with the employees, to develop shared understanding of the company direction, ERM employees are empowered to make decisions which are most beneficial to the company.
Each of the features on Minerva support one or more of the four objectives.
To support the objective of building a global network, the following features are implemented:

My Site – all employees have a personal site with contact information, expertise information, photos and CVs attached. All employees can choose to set up a personal blog if they wish;
Integration with instant messaging – by clicking on any contact names on the intranet, the employee can initiate an online conversation with a colleague;
Operating company sites – each of the 40 operating companies has a portal on Minerva with detailed company information and a listing of key contacts in each office;
Communities of practice (CoP)site – each global practitioner’s network has a portal area for practitioners to share news, resources and collaborate with one another. Each site is managed by a business sponsor and a site facilitator.

To support the objective of increasing visibility of local work, the following features are implemented:

A document library which enables any ERM employee to share local work globally. Once the work is posted to this section, the content will be reviewed and discussed with the appropriate communities of practice, and will be moved to the CoP site if appropriate;
A feature on the Minerva homepage enables employees to easily share news, introduce new hires and send out global announcement (which replaces global e-mail to all staff).
To support the objective of making Cross-OpCo collaboration easy, the following features are implemented:
Online project sites – any employee can request for an online project site to enable them to collaborate with colleagues from other offices on client projects. They can use the site to share news, manage project documentation, assign tasks and discuss business issues;
ERM Wiki Wiki – To enable quick collaboration, ERM Wiki Wiki is designed to enable employees to be involved in collaborative writing. No approval is required to set up a wiki. Employees have been using wiki to set agenda and finalise project documents;
CEO’s blog – the CEO has a prominent link to his blog from the homepage, which enables him to interact with staff of all levels directly. All comments and posts are not moderated and are visible immediately when a posting is made;
Urgent requests – our consultants very often want to find out what expertise and experience exists in ERM’s other offices in order to resolve some highly complex environmental issues. Any employees can submit an urgent request and expect to get responses from others within 24 hours. This section is located in the most prominent area on the homepage.

To support the objective of enabling employees to have quick and easy access to global information, the following features are implemented:

Launch of Minerva when the computer is switched on;
An ERM global calendar including all the major events happening in different parts of the world. The three latest events are displayed dynamically on the intranet homepage;
New hire exercise – all new hires can complete an online exercise to learn about Minerva and its features.

From a support perspective, the Global KS Team has set up a ‘Minerva Support Site’, which offers a fully-integrated support function. This site hosts all key contact information, training materials and intranet policies related to Minerva use.
The most interesting feature is a helpdesk function which has been recognised as best practice in using intranet. The key features of this helpdesk are:

Enables any user to submit a question for help or for improvement on the support site;#
The support team receives an alert when new requests come in;
The requests are assigned to an appropriate team member who is notified by e-mail to take action;
After the request is closed, a team member updates the case history, documents how the problem has been resolved and changes the status of the request from ‘open’ to ‘closed’;
An e-mail is generated to capture feedback from users;
A report is generated to enable the team to capture the number of requests received, logged and closed on a monthly basis;
All issues which cannot be dealt with will be logged as a ‘change request’, which will be reviewed and prioritised on a quarterly basis;
This business process supported by Minerva is critical to collect intelligence, to enable the team to understand the strengths and weaknesses of Minerva and to drive continuous improvement.

Minerva users
The users of Minerva are the 3000 employees of ERM. The employees are located in over 120 offices in 40 countries covering the US, Europe, Asia, Australia and Latin America.
The bulk of the employees are consultants who are strategists, scientists and specialists delivering integrated and innovative solutions for leading business and government clients, assisting them to tackle a wide range of environmental areas and risks such as: air quality; climate change; compliance auditing; corporate social responsibility; economic services; environmental impact assessment; environmental management and information systems; urban design and landscape; construction management; health and safety; merger and acquisition advisory services; policy studies; risk management; site investigation and remediation; waste management; water and wastewater.
Our consultants have to work effectively as a global team to scan the environment, pursue client opportunities, develop proposals and solutions, and establish tools and methodologies to address environmental issues in different parts of the world. As part of their job, they have to keep themselves abreast of the latest developments by learning from one another through internal meetings and training events in which they share latest techniques, insight, experience and learning points. As many of our clients are Fortune 500 clients who have presence in multiple geographical locations, many consultants are assigned to multi-national project teams and work around the clock to deliver global solutions for our clients.
Other users of Minerva are supporting staff who work in finance, marketing, knowledge management, human resource, legal and risk management. They establish global policies and frameworks, and implement global tools to ensure the smooth running of the organisation by delivering high-quality services to the consultants.

Supporting user tasks
Our consultants are busy and demand quick and easy access to information at the time they want it. Minerva supports these specific tasks at different stages of the consulting processes:

Pursuing client opportunities – consultants can use Minerva to find out which key clients we are working with around the world and the partners in charge of these clients. When pursuing new opportunities, the consultants can easily get in touch with the partner-in-charge by clicking on their name and initiating an online conversation. They can also find out whether ERM is working on other projects with the client by looking through the online project site listing;
Developing a proposal – consultants can use the people search function to search for experts, find their billable rates and download their CVs. They can go into the CoP portals to look for firm-wide experts’ lists, proposal examples and marketing materials. If there are gaps in the information they need, they can post an urgent request on the homepage to get input from colleagues around the globe;
Winning a job – consultants can use the ‘Clients Wins’ and ‘Global Announcement’ on the homepage to share the good news. Colleagues who have set an alert to these sections will be sent an e-mail immediately;
Sharing latest knowledge – subject matter experts set up blog posts to share latest thinking on ‘Site Investigation and Remediation’. All members have set up an e-mail alert so they know when a new post is made and they can add their comments and ask the experts questions;
Delivering the project – the project team with members based in multiple locations make use of ERM wiki wiki to finalise project plans and co-write project reports. They also share all project documentations and assign tasks using online project sites. When the project report is completed, the partner-in-charge reviews the report and then posts the final version onto the project site;
At project closure – before the closure of the project site, the project manager will decide which key documents can be shared globally and declare the document ‘global’. By doing so, it will change its status from a restricted document to one that is searchable by all employees.

For our supporting team, Minerva provides:

A global communication channel to share global policies and documents;
An online tool for employees to ask questions and clarify existing policies.

Design
There are additional examples of what we have done to make the design more interesting and usable:

Senior partners jointly established an agenda for a two-day strategy meeting using a wiki page. Altogether, 47 partners were involved in setting the agenda and contributing their thoughts from 40 different countries. Most partners are not familiar with Web 2.0 but they found wiki extremely easy to use once they were shown examples of how others are using it in business context;
Minerva videos were launched in May 2007, with the introduction of the intranet. All staff could click on two video clips on the homepage to view an introduction from the CEO and the global head of knowledge & information. The CEO used the video to officially launch his blog;
CEO’s blog was launched in May 2007 and enabled all employees to have direct conversations with the CEO. No anonymous posting is allowed, and all comments are visible to all users. We have received positive feedback from consultants who reported that this has demonstrated real transparency and help break down hierarchical structure;
Tackling climate change – in July 2007, we launched a campaign to look at how ERM should address climate change as an organisation. We designed a section on the homepage made up of a video clip, a blog post from our climate change expert and a poll to enable all staff to comment and have a genuine discussion with one another and with the senior leaders to address this issue;
The frontpage of ERM Annual Report – in June 2006, we launched a poll on the homepage to encourage all ERMers to vote for their favourite picture (taken by ERM employees) to be used as the front cover of our Annual Report;
To welcome new hires into ERM and encourage them to learn about the company, its structure, its culture and its people, Minerva provides an online e-learning site for new hires to go through the various parts of the system and understand its features through a 10-step guide. At the end of the exercise, they have to fill in a survey to provide their feedback and comments. Once it is saved, it will trigger a workflow to the KS team, who will follow up the training with more in-depth training and present them with a welcome gift;
Personalisation – to enable staff to find more relevant information on the homepage, a section is targeted at staff in one particular country and the information is viewable by staff from that country only. For example, the Central Europe management system on the homepage is only visible to staff in that region.

Benefits
Minerva has greatly improved business performance in the following ways:

Time savings – our consultants have reported that they have saved at least 10 minutes a day in accessing critical business information (for example, proposals, sales materials, consultant’s CVs). This is translated to savings of US$187,500 per week at a rate of US$75 per hour;
Reduction in e-mails – as employees learn to use Minerva as an alternative to e-mail to support communications, the number of mass e-mails sent out to worldwide staff has reduced from around 10 to 15 a week, to none;
Improved collaboration using ERM wiki wiki – our senior partners have embraced ERM wiki wiki to co-create partners’ meeting agenda, finalise policy papers without the need to exchange long threads of e-mails. Our 47 senior partners have reported savings of one hour in collaborating on documents when compared to pre-Minerva times. This is translated to savings of US$14,100;
Effective team collaboration – our consultants have reported more effective communication and team working through the use of online project sites. On average, a 15-people project team have reported a saving of two hours per week per site member. This is translated into a saving of US$2250 per online project site per week, at a rate of US$75 per hour;
Speed of response to customers through improved cross-office collaboration – our business developers and consultants have reported increased effectiveness in closing sales and responding to our customers through the use of an ‘urgent request’ feature on the homepage. Within six weeks of launch, 50 requests and 100 replies have been posted by colleagues from all around the globe. Most replies came in within 24 hours.

The quality of response has been rated as excellent and resulted in ERM winning proposals, demonstrating our capabilities and satisfying our key clients. We have won two big proposals as a result of global collaboration which would not be possible in pre-Minerva launch times.
ERM has also reaped the following benefits which have a positive impact on business performance:

Staff satisfaction – new hires who have completed the online induction exercise have commented on how much more user friendly it is compared to intranet sites they had used before;
Improved staff engagement in addressing corporate social responsibility issues. Minerva has promoted a step change in the organisation culture by flattening the hierarchy and allowing more genuine and open global dialogue. For example, in July 2007, we launched a campaign to gather inputs from all employees on how ERM should address our carbon footprint, using a video clip, a blog post and a survey. All staff could contribute and have direct conversations with senior managers and with their peers to share their views. The results contributed to a policy recommendation to the board;
Potential increase in market share – our key client directors based in four continents have made extensive use of the online collaboration space to share intelligence relating to our Fortune 500 key clients. The global sales team are more networked and able to pursue new opportunities. We have not reported on quantifiable benefits at this stage, but our sales director and key client director has endorsed the use of Minerva as a critical tool to support the sales team in growing the business;
External recognition and brand building – through word of mouth, our consultants have showed our clients Minerva and how it has helped to improve their work productivity. Although we do not provide IT consultancy, as a trusted advisor to our clients ERM has been invited to demonstrate Minerva and share our implementation experience with our Fortune 500 clients. ERM has also been invited to share our success in a few upcoming international conference events;
CEO’s satisfaction – one of the best examples of the benefits Minerva has provided is shown in the CEO’s blog. In his various posts Regan has repeatedly mentioned how much he is impressed by Minerva’s ability to link up colleagues and leverage our collective expertise.

In summary
Web 2.0 was a new concept to ERM but only two months after the launch, the usage figures were promising:

Our 3000 employees have recorded 400,000 visits;
Our CEO’s blog has recorded 12,000 visits;
Fifty global urgent requests for expertise or resource have been posted and resulted in 102 replies;
Twenty-six online project sites have been set up;
Twenty-two wiki sites have been created;
The support team answers about 300 requests a month.

It is a nice surprise to see that Minerva has been embraced by both the younger consultants and the senior leaders. In opening up the space for dialogue and interaction on a global level, Minerva has broken down ERM’s hierarchy and increased peer-to-peer learning. It enables the organisation to leverage its collective expertise to grow the business and support consultants’ career development. It has exceeded our business requirements, delivering outcomes far beyond what the senior leaders imagined possible.

Bonnie Cheuk is head of knowledge & information in the Global Knowledge Sharing Program at ERM. She can be contacted at bonnie.cheuk@gmail.com.

References
1. Dervin, B. (1992) ‘From The Mind’s Eye of the User: The Sense-Making qualitative quantitative methodology’. In J. D. Glazier & R. R. Powell (Eds.), Qualitative Research in Information Management: 61-84. Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited.