A success story from Texas Instruments

August 16, 2009

A success story from Texas Instruments

Texas Instruments (TI) has a success story,- they have sucessfully implemented Enterprise 2.0 apps in order to provide a better customer cumminity where customers help each other solve problems faster.

In 2004 TI noticed a problem in its customer service department. TI needed a better way to quickly provide answers to customer questions, without the customer sitting on hold with the call center, waiting for a representative who might not even have the technical expertise to answer the inquiry. In response to this problem TI decided to build a enterprise 2.0 community-based application called E2E, which stands for engineers to engineers and was launched in late 2008. E2E is an externally-facing community where TI’s staff interacts with engineering customers and where the engineers can interact with each other. This way TI makes peer-to-peer collaboration possible and the customer shifts from being passive to proactive. In relation to the Tapscott and Williams seven models of peer-production, TI can really benefit from this wisdom of crowds in terms of creating new and better products and solutions, by knocking down the boundaries that isolates the company.

Today TI has successfully transformed much of its customer service into a portal where customers and TI employees can share best practices that help solve common technical challenges. If TI’s customer service receives phone calls, it’s for a more specific question that is not as broadly question applicable to the whole community.

TI’s E2E is build on a platform with technology from Telligent, a company that makes Web 2.0 technologies for enterprises. According to Associate Professor at Harvard Business School, Andrew McAfee Enterprise 2.0. is characterized as follows:
Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.

McAfee has coined a mnemonic to make it easy for everyone to remember what appears to be the key aspects of these social platforms, called SLATES (Search, Links, Authoring, Tags, Extensions & Signals). SLATES is an easy checklist to ensure that a tool consist of the right essential ingredients to be characterized as a Enterprise 2.0 tool. Most companies intranets and portals still cannot live up to the qualities that are believed to be important for better business outcomes.

 Telligent is a Enterprise 2.0 tool because it provide an external-facing community application that enables organizations to listen to, learn from, and improve conversations with customers. Customers can quickly Search and navigate in the blogs, forums and wikis for answers.  Blogs, forums, groups, ratings, and more work together to create a connection point geared towards ongoing customer engagement. Everybody is Authors and can contribute to the wiki etc. and it is possible to add hyperlLinks to external documents or to anchor within pages or posts, as well as remove hyperlinks and anchors. The categorization system that is build from Tagging is called folksonomy. Because the platform will be developed over time by TI’s customers a folksonomy is build instead of a taxonomy which is build by experts. Extensions are possible. In this way users can recommend stuff to each other. The RSS feeds make it possible for bloggers to generate Signals, i.e. small notices each time they add some content.

Many companies perceive Enterprise 2.0 technologies as being disruptive technologies, but according to McAfee Enterprise 2.0 technologies are not necessarily incompatible with older ones. Instead of being disruptive existing channels and platforms can be enhanced by adding some SLATES components. According to Dion Hinchcliffe Enterprise 2.0 seems to work better when it lives in close contact with existing IT systems than in isolation.

 Hichcliffe has introduced an extension to the SLATES mnemonic: FLATNESSES, where social, emergent, network-oriented and freeform aspects are added, because they are so essential.

For companies such as Texas Instruments, the Enterprise 2.0 tool Telligent also provides a social environment that enables people to share knowledge, generate quality content, and inspire conversations through the use of software and technology. As Hinchcliffe points out Enterprise 2.0 initiatives is often used in entirely unexpected ways. This is because these tools are generally so freeform, that they will regularly be used in ways they were never originally intended. Many companies even realize that their platforms also are great branding and PR tools because it brings the company and customers closer together. Blogs and wikis can be put to just about any use in terms of accumulating knowledge and collaborating over a network.

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