Collaboration 2.0 Inside Electronic Arts

Notes from a collaboration and social computing session at Enterprise 2.0 conference:

The presentation will provide insight into EA's internal social collaboration strategy, successes and failures, solution, insights, best practices. Specifically, we will look at our integrated social networking, knowledge management, community and search solution.

Speaker - Bert Sandie, Director - Technical Excellence, Electronic Arts, Inc.

Bert is a key contributor to Electronic Art's (EA) dynamic culture. His technical and leadership background in the high-tech industry has helped him drive sharing, social connections, collaboration and innovation at EA. His current projects include knowledge management, social networking, and learning and development solutions at EA.

Notes:

• Bert: Efforts driven by HR, focused on KM and social networking for a few years
• Know more about employees from external information that info available internally
• EA has 9,000 employees, global company, employees all over the world,
• Games are highly instrumented so consumer experience can be improved
• Multiple YouTube channels including one for recruiting, Twitter for EA and commercial products, multiple branded web properties, forums for customer feedback - all these things influence employee experiences
• Best guess. 3/5 employees on Facebook, maybe more - used at home and at work (not blocked)
• Very visual company, YouTube also not blocked
• Three years ago not much blogging but not certain levels of employees all blog on games
• How does this all influence collaboration? KM, blogging, streaming, social networking, communication, image management, notifications...
• Doing all this internally, 9 year journey, beginning with a "knowledge portal" that included user profiles
• "Knowing your users" as important internally as externally
• Products have too many features - overwhelming users - giving someone a user manual means you have failed
• Think of collaboration as a lifecycle - including face to face communication - face to face builds relationships and trust, personal insight
• Why do people participate? learning, competitive, socializing, recognition, sharing, collaborate, affinity, validation, altruism...
• Note: salient point - identifying participation models is important when trying to understand collaboration
• Defining the user experience: Aesthetics, Functionality, Usability .... design is important - design includes how it works
• Knowledge portal, social network, enterprise search key pillars - built on top of SharePoint - in a year with 2 developers
• Principal: Usability: fast and responsive; easy to understand, simple to use
• Principal: Features: user profiles (role, team, skills, interests), content management (articles, blogs, videos), communities of practice (groups), unified search as well as team specific solutions (sites and wikis)
• Principal: "The Look": typography, layout, color palette, graphics and images
• About 5000 views per month on knowledge portal out of employee base of 9000
• Have internal YouTube capability but no ratings (ratings might discourage contributions - all content is valuable).
• EA has multiple skins for MySite profile ... gives every team or part of the organization a group social identity (e.g., around games)
• About 25 skins, teams build them - they want that affinity, community - (social identity)