One on One with Len Devanna of EMC

Len Devanna [1] is the director of Web Strategy at EMC [2]. If it sounds like a great title that's because it is. Devanna is responsible for the internal community platform known as EMC ONE. He says of his job, "I often feel like a kid in a candy store. I have a strong passion for all things online, and [I] get to help drive the evolution of our online ecosystem each and every day." During his time at EMC, he also helped lead the enterprise knowledge management initiative, build a field/customer/partner-facing portal and completely retool the EMC.com experience while consolidating several sites into one. I asked Devanna about EMC's Web 2.0 initiative and how that has helped increased collaboration and knowledge sharing.

FCM: How open is the company to developing social networking concepts?

LD: Extremely open. EMC has a strong culture of innovation and is therefore very much open to exploring emerging trends and technologies. We see social media as a key channel for establishing dialogue with our audience while creating more intimate conversations and relationships. Frankly, we see it as a strategic imperative. The days of broadcast communications are over. Companies need to learn to listen and engage with their audience. The opportunities afforded through social tools and techniques to co-innovate with your audience, to improve productivity and collaboration, and to better understand the needs of your customer are tremendous.

FCM: Can you describe some of the social networking projects you have helped put in place?

LD: I’d have to focus on the launch of EMC ONE, our internal community for EMC-ers. About a year or so ago, EMC VP Chuck Hollis and I were discussing the need for an internal community offering. Within weeks of that discussion, we launched EMC ONE. I suppose the time to market here speaks to EMC’s desire to aggressively adopt and embrace social media.

FCM: I heard about this EMC social experiment: A Day in the Life of EMC [3]. Were you involved in this at all? What are your thoughts on this?

LD: Yes, this is effectively EMC ONE. About a year old now, EMC ONE has over 8K active members and thousands more watching the conversations. I’d venture to guess we have about 25% adoption across the global workforce, with 150 to 200 new members joining weekly.

The benefit and value of EMC ONE has been enormous. We’re seeing conversations taking place that cross organizational and geographic boundaries. Relationships are being forged between employees who otherwise would never have had an opportunity to meet or interact with one another. Discussions around commute times and the price of gas transform into conversations around green computing, and ultimately mature into ideas for new products or solutions.

The value of behavioral change that comes with E2.0 proficiency is also worth noting … For example, information once confined to email with limited distribution is now making it’s way to collaborative Wikis--where the employee population at large can contribute and the information is retained and indexed forever. The productivity gains alone, as we move from traditional 1.0 to 2.0 behaviors, are stunning.

FCM: Documentum has a lot of social networking built into the latest release. Did your group's role in social networking play fuel this development, or was it more market forces, or a combination?

LD: First, let me just say that I’m truly excited about where this is going. The convergence of traditional EMC tools and functionality with 2.0 offerings, such as wiki’s and blogs, is quite appealing to me. The notion of an internal group collaborating on content within a wiki, then being able to seamlessly push it into enterprise workflows that run it through approvals (if any), then on to a translation house before ultimately ending up on the web is quite cool. Until now, bridging the gap between such 2.0 tools and ECM systems has been a sizable integration effort for IT.

To your question, I’d have to say a combination of the two … While I work at EMC, I’m also a customer. As you’d suspect, Documentum is the ECM engine behind our web properties. As part of the team responsible for understanding the online needs of the enterprise, we’re acutely aware of the tools and capabilities companies need to successfully move into the 2.0 space. Having real world experience in deploying social tools across EMC has given us perspective around what people need to be successful, and has armed our product teams with invaluable first hand data. As you suggest, there’s clearly demand from the market as well.

FCM: I noticed that Documentum's marketing team made use of social networking for the release of the latest version--even by using Facebook. Were you involved in that? If so, how?

Yes, I had the pleasure of being part of this team. It’s indicative of the EMC culture--always trying to do something new and innovative.

As noted earlier, I really do have a passion for this stuff, and that’s no secret within EMC. When the Marketing/PR team decided to experiment with social tools to support the launch, they brought me in to provide my point of view. They did a great job with Facebook and, in fact, have quite a following there now. You may have also noticed a social media press release supporting the launch--giving bloggers and media outlets better tools to syndicate the message. YouTube also played a big part in this launch, providing chalk talk videos that cut right to the heart of the matter. We’ve invested in so much more: Twitter, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, etc. As you can see, we’re all about trying new things to better connect with our audience.

FCM: What social networking tools are people using? Are employees encouraged to use Facebook and Twitter? I know you do, but in general are they encouraged to use these types of tools, or to use in-house tools inside the firewall?

LD: We’ve tried not to be prescriptive around tools. Doing so would only hamper creativity. EMC ONE is clearly at the epicenter of our internal social deployment and provides blog, discussion and wiki capabilities. Beyond that, I’ve seen plenty of EMC-ers on Twitter, Facebook and all of the other usual suspects. Yammer [4] has my interest right now, and has seen some pretty solid adoption within the company. In my opinion, it brings a new dimension to real-time collaboration among project teams. It’s always interesting to see which tools stick and which don’t, and watching this evolving landscape is absolutely fascinating to me.

It’s also worth mentioning EMC’s FriendFeed account [5]. Check it out to get a sense for the variety of things EMC is doing in the social realm.