customer case study

Collapsing time and distance barriers

Social Business Software helps CSC meet the

challenges of collaborating in an expanding marketplace
and global economy. And it quickly had a positive
CSC is a $16 billion, Fortune 200
consulting, systems integration,
impact on CSC’s revenue-generating activities.
and outsourcing company with over
92,000 employees and customers
in over 90 countries. For more
than 50 years, CSC has provided
its customers in industry and
government with technology-
enabled solutions crafted to meet
their strategic goals. Among
CSC customers are some of the
largest organizations in the
world. CSC is headquartered
in Falls Church, Virginia.

© 2010 Jive Software. All rights reserved.

 | customer case study
“We started this project knowing that, while enterprise 2.0
was cool, for CSC it had to be more than just Facebook
for the enterprise. We had to understand our company
strategy, our corporate culture, and how an effort in this
area could accelerate our business goals.” 02

Claire Flanagan, Senior Manager, Knowledge Management and Enterprise Social Collaboration

Business impetus for Social Business Software Business value delivered

As a provider of information technology services, CSC tends to
have a higher percentage of knowledge workers and a more
collaborative culture than most companies. Still, the enterprise
grapples with problems similar to those all global companies
with large, dispersed workforces face:
• Locating experts and assets in their large, global organization
• On-boarding new hires (including transitioning employees
from major accounts)
• Loss of intellectual property through attrition
• Barriers to innovation in the form of time and distance
challenges and siloed organizations and tools
Also, as a consulting company, it is imperative for CSC to retain
thought leadership and competency in evolving paradigms with
their accompanying tools.
Solution focus and goals
To address these challenges, CSC embraced a strategic
initiative called C3: Connect. Communicate. Collaborate. C3’s
mission was to explore the use of leading-edge 2.0 technology
to “connect people to people, connect people to content, and
connect people to communities.”
Jive Social Business Software at work
CSC launched their C3 initiative as a six-month pilot of
Social Business Software powered by Jive. Although limited
in duration, the pilot was available to any of CSC’s 92,000
employees. The pilot was extremely successful—going from
zero to 25,000 users in the first 20 weeks. Rapid adoption rates
combined with user testimonials proved valuable for the final
stage in making the business case, moving C3 from “pilot”
mode to a fully supported platform.
C3 quickly had a positive impact on CSC’s revenue-generating
activities, which for CSC revolves initially around a bid and
proposal process that often requires global team collaboration
across different time zones. With the pilot, CSC demonstrated
a clear linkage from Social Business Software to the initiative’s
strategic objectives:
• Collapsing time and distance barriers to leverage global
expertise. A U.S.-based employee posted a request for
proposal-related information in C3. This request generated
240 views, 11 global replies, and the right answer from
a global colleague in 30 minutes.
• Reducing cycle time for proposal development to reduce
customer acquisition costs. Consultants had their questions
answered quickly, shaving days off their bid and proposal process.
• Greater ease in locating and engaging internal experts to
facilitate collaboration. An employee located the expertise
they needed for a new business opportunity in two days using
C3, a process that the individual reported had previously
averaged 5-10 days.
• New employee on-boarding. Transition teams established
buddy and on-boarding programs in C3 to help new
employees feel immediately connected to the larger whole.
• Collaborating more broadly to drive process efficiencies.
Major account teams moved their collaborative efforts to
C3, which closed communication gaps around key customer
accounts and facilitated timely status and project updates.

© 2010 Jive Software. All rights reserved.


“We realized early on that this was not just another IT tool but rather a
tool for people: our employees. We took a people-centric view of the
system and focused a lot of energy on making it easy and fun to use
right from the start. These efforts paid real dividends with adoption
exceeding our most optimistic expectations.”
The backstory
The journey to Social Business Software by way of portal
applications and wiki projects
Collaboration, as CSC knows well from its five decades in the
technology consulting business, is crucial to keeping up with
the velocity of technology change and an expanding global
marketplace. CSC began its collaborative journey by evolving
its use of Lotus Notes databases and portal applications and,
more recently, leveraging the work of several “skunk works”
wiki projects into a global wiki offering available to all
employees. Ultimately, their use of cutting-edge technology
took them to Jive.
“All of these early collaboration efforts combined to lay a good
foundation for our move into a new arena—social collaboration
for the enterprise,” says Claire Flanagan, Senior Manager,
Knowledge Management and Enterprise Social Collaboration.
Multiple business drivers
Headed up by Claire, the CSC enterprise 2.0 project team
identified critical business realities they felt a 2.0 solution
could address:
• It was difficult to locate experts and assets, which is a barrier
to innovation.
• New hires and employees transitioning from customer
accounts don’t know where to start to become
immediately productive.
• Digital natives in the enterprise expect to use tools that are
readily available in the consumer marketplace.
• There is a risk of intellectual property loss through attrition
and through employee use of Web 2.0 tools outside the
firewall to conduct business.
• Internal competency around 2.0 technologies has become
increasingly important to CSC’s core business as more and
more customers ask about the new technologies.
• “The project team felt it was important to be credible and do
our homework,” says Claire. “By focusing on the business
problems and how they tied to CSC’s strategy and the evolving
marketplace, the team was able to craft a tight business case
that was ultimately well received by our executive sponsors.”
© 2010 Jive Software. All rights reserved.
| customer case study
03
John Chambers, Senior Principal System Architect
Why Jive?
The CSC team benchmarked Jive against other enterprise 2.0
commercial products and open-source options as well as a
“build your own” option. Jive did the best job of meeting CSC
requirements across a number of fronts, reports
Claire, including:
• Track record of innovation. Jive has a track record of
delivering major product innovation in the form of two major
releases a year. This was important to CSC because they
felt that enterprise 2.0 technology was evolving quickly,
and users would expect the capability to keep up with
marketplace innovations.
“Users no longer accept slow release cycles; they expect
technology to keep pace with what is happening in the
consumer marketplace,” says Claire. “Since we started our
partnership with Jive, we have seen their commitment in
keeping their market-release promises. While some of the
bigger brands struggle to deliver major innovation once
a year or once every three years, Jive has been aggressive
in its product strategy.”
• The ability to bridge internal and external communities.
Jive shared a key vision and goal CSC has for a comprehensive
ecosystem: a platform that goes beyond internal collaboration
to bridge customer and partner communities as well.
“At the time we made our decision, this was a vision we had
not heard from any other provider in the marketplace,”
says Claire. “As a consulting company, this vision was
incredibly important to us as our employees often collaborate
in private teams with each other, in private project teams
with our customers, or in market-facing instances with
many customers.”
• The Jive user experience. CSC made user experience a
priority and involved users in the tool selection process. CSC
knew users would vote with their feet, and healthy adoption
rates could not be achieved with a tool that wasn’t easy to use.
“The Jive user experience was the ultimate decision factor,”
says John Glowacki, Corporate Vice President and Chief
Technology Officer. “We had made technology investments
before that gave more weight to the back end and were not
being broadly used. We were determined this time around
to have our buy decision driven by user feedback.”

Getting guidance from Jive Professional Services
The first launch issue the CSC team faced was whether to
try to drive adoption or to let it grow virally. “You hear in the
marketplace that you can’t plan to go viral,” says Claire. “But I
argue that you can’t go viral unless you plan well. We knew we
had to be strategic in our user adoption planning.”
With assistance from Jive Professional Services, the CSC team
thought very carefully about their adoption plan to ensure
successful deployment and adoption. The team created a multi-
layer advocate program that included a “top-down, bottoms-up,
and side-ways approach.” The team leveraged this advocate
group as trusted planning advisors to help develop adoption
plans and seed business use cases prior to launch.
They also thought carefully about structure patterns. They
chose to not prescribe how CSC employees would engage with
each other on the platform or to have the platform reflect the
company’s organization chart.
“We decided to let collaboration patterns emerge on their own,”
says Claire, “by allowing users to create groups in a self-service
manner for the communities of practice, interests, or projects
they needed.”
Champions and advocates go to work
Twelve “champions” brought more than 100 advocates on board,
who helped the team formulate adoption plans, seed content,
and test over 200 groups prior to the pilot’s launch. Users were
greeted with groups that had immediate relevance to their
jobs—such as Request for Assistance (Where have we done
this before?), Cloud Computing, Cult of Mac, Excel Power Tips,
Friends of the Penguin (for Linux lovers), Women in Leadership,
and more.
Users were also greeted with a global advocate community
that could answer their questions quickly. Getting questions
answered proved to be immensely valuable, according to Claire.
“As employees got their questions addressed, they became
addicted, and then they, themselves, turned into another
powerful wave of advocates helping nurture new users.”
Another successful adoption practice that proved valuable was
offering a “virtual watercooler” for non-work-related topics to
promote connections and introductions. “Sometimes the first
post is the hardest to get people to make,” says Yvonne Decker,
C3 Community Manager. “By offering them a fun place to try
out the tool, we made it easy for people to get their feet wet and
begin thinking about how they could use it. The most popular
post was ‘Where is everyone from?’ which had 3,209 views and
322 posts.”
© 2010 Jive Software. All rights reserved.
| customer case study
Marketing the pilot as C3
Powered by Jive, the pilot was marketed as fulfilling the
company’s C3 strategic initiative: Connect. Communicate.
Collaborate.
• Connect: time zones and distance will no longer be barriers.
Employees were encouraged to use profiles and connections
04
to expand their CSC network.
• Communicate: share your work, share your thoughts.
Employees were encouraged to use personal and group blogs
to share knowledge or group news.
• Collaborate: get work done with others.
Employees were encouraged to join groups, collaborate on
documents, join discussions, and ask and answer questions.
• Make C3 work for you.
Employees were encouraged to decide how they wanted to
receive updates using their personal dashboard, RSS, tags,
bookmarks, and email subscriptions.
Pilot surpasses their highest expectations
The manner in which C3 was deployed within CSC was a major
departure from the usual model of deploying internal systems,
reports John Chambers. “By partnering with Jive Hosting,
we were able to leverage Jive’s experience and knowledge
to deploy and operate the platform. This choice enabled CSC
to focus on business and adoption planning and rapidly advance
from conceptual phases, to production pilot, and finally to full
production in a fraction of the time the traditional deployment
model would have required,” says John.
In just 20 weeks, C3 surpassed their highest expectations with:
• Rapid adoption: 25,000+ registered users
• Robust activity: an average of 1 million page views and over
150,000 activities per month
• Community: more than 2,100 groups representing a number
of communities of practice, communities of interest, and
technology or competency-focused communities as well as
other watercooler-type topics. CSC employees commented
that they felt part of a larger whole—and were “proud to
be CSC.”
• Centralization of intellectual property: 84% of all
communities or groups created in Jive are open for
employees to join. This generates a significant amount
of re-usable intellectual property—such as posted
content, discussion threads, and answers to questions—
that more typically get lost on siloed desktops and in
email communications.
 | customer case study
Executive feedback was enthusiastic
And CSC’s executives were all on board. “Our executive
leadership took active roles both in the sponsorship of this
program internally and in the communication of this program
externally,” says Claire.
• Business Unit Group Presidents, CSC’s Office of the CIO—
05
which includes the corporate CIO and CTO, the CIO Council,
and other top executives—not only provided the necessary
sponsorship for this program but also provided early, formal
business unit resources to support the pilot adoption plan and
C3’s subsequent move into production.
• Group presidents and other executives led by example,
sending division emails to their staff, using the tool to blog,
and demonstrating that this new tool was appropriate
for business.

Post pilot update

As of this writing, CSC has transitioned to a fully
supported, Jive-hosted platform that has received a global
security stamp of approval and integrated single sign-on
privileges. In addition, CSC has added video collaboration
capabilities to its Jive platform. They now have over 45,000
registered users and over 4,000 groups.

Jive. First in Social.

Jive is the largest and fastest-growing independent Social Business Software company in the world.
For more information, visit www.jivesoftware.com.

jive software 325 lytton avenue, palo alto, ca 94301 o 1.877.495.3700 f 1.503.961.1047 + 1.503.972.6143