ABB Case

• Enterprise Social Networking


  Helps organizations innovate and grow
• ABB is a global supplier of power grids, industrial motors and drives, and generators for industrial, commercial, and utility operations
• ABB has about 135,000 employees in 100 countries around the world
• Collaboration, sharing information, and ongoing innovation are essential for ABB's growth and business success
• ABB's corporate intranet


  • Too static and outmoded to meet its current needs for empowering and energizing employees
  • Poor capabilities for searching for information
  • Information was often added instead of changed, creating multiple versions of the same content
  • Employees were storing information in various platforms besides the intranet, adding to confusion and inefficiency
  • Lacked tools to help staff have dialogues, share ideas, and work with other members of the company
• What ABB needed


  A central resource that would support dynamic knowledge sharing, with tools to help employees work more closely together
• How ABB replaced its intranet

  1. Deployed Inside +, a more dynamic and socially enabled intranet

  2. Integrated Microsoft Yammer, Office 365, and SharePoint
• Yammer


  • Enterprise social networking platform used by over 200,000 organizations worldwide
  • Enables employees to create groups, collaborate on projects, share and edit documents, and access a news feed
• SharePoint


  • Microsoft's platform for collaboration, document sharing, and document management
• Office 365


  • Microsoft's online service for its Office productivity applications, including email and online meeting/videoconferencing
• Inside +


  • Integrates all the key internal platforms that employees use for their work
  • Includes Yammer feeds, access to SharePoint and Office 365
• Inside + is now used by 50,000 ABB employees, nearly one-third of the company's global workforce
• Benefits of ABB becoming more "social"


  • Employees use Yammer and Inside + to collaborate on projects, share ideas, and discover experts in other departments
  • Reduced email by 50% for some teams
  • Employees can be productive anytime and anywhere with mobile access
  • Saved on conference costs by running events online on Yammer
  • More employees feel closely involved with the business as a whole
• ABB's experience illustrates how much organizations today rely on information systems supporting collaboration and teamwork to innovate, execute, and grow profits