Decisively Digital

Chapter 6Corporate Social Network to Drive Collaborative Culture as Key Enabler for Modern Work

This real-life example is based on an engagement at a pharmaceutical company.

The pharma company's communication and collaboration were limited to emails. Teams were working in silos, using various consumer tools such as WhatsApp to connect and to share information. Without a central platform for collaborating and sharing knowledge, employees had a difficult time finding the information they needed. They had to send documents and spreadsheets as attachments to work on them together.

Drupal, an open source content management system (CMS), was used as knowledge storage, but it was poorly maintained and the information was usually out of date. A platform for video calls was used only for external purposes, as its limited usability and the lack of integration were not attractive to the employees.

Best-of-Breed vs. Best-of-Suite

In choosing solutions for improved communication and collaboration, the pharma company followed the best-of-breed approach. A best-of-breed approach means that the organization must invest time in each individual product's upgrade cycle for integration and testing. Some components even lack a proper integration, which makes workarounds (with scripts or additional integration tools) necessary. In a best-of-suite solution, this is typically not required, as the suite's components usually follow the same release cycle and are already well integrated.

If companies ...