"The Social Workplace: Using Social Networks to Boost Learning, Collaboration, and Success"

"Plateau delivers a best-of-breed talent management solution with deep functionality for learning management, performance management, compensation management and career and succession planning. This allows organizations to take a unified approach to develop, manage, reward and optimize their talent."
Source: Plateau Systems

Resources Related to The Social Workplace: Using Social Networks to Boost Learning, Collaboration, and Success:

• Social Network (Wikipedia)

The Social Workplace: Using Social Networks to Boost Learning, Collaboration, and Success

How Plateau Talent Gateway^TM turns the internal connections and expertise that already exist within organizations into tangible bottom-line business assets.

Discover great trainers, subject matttter experts and mentors

Some of the best experts in the business already work for you. They're your long-time employees, top performers and innovators. Unlock their expertise and the impact could be dramatic: Imagine giving every employee direct access to the industry – and institutional – knowledge of your most senior people. Imaging having your top performers train and mentor new employees. Imagine product training that comes direct from product experts in the field. And imagine empowering your team to engage in dynamic exchanges with customers, vendors, consultants and colleagues without booking flights and conference rooms or having projects delayed by time-zone differences.

"If HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times as profitable.
-Lew Platt Former CEO of Hewlett-Packard

No doubt you'd see costs go down as productivity, performance and innovation rise. As a bonus you will see employee engagement go up, as people feel more involved and excited about contributing. It's that bottom-line return that has so many organizations (including the Federal Government) interested in learning how to use Web 2.0 social media tools to create a workforce supported by vibrant networking and collaboration. The challenge is to translate the concept of leveraging in-house talent into real-world practices and systems. One of the easiest and most effective ways to do this is with Plateau Talent Gateway, a full-featured portal and collaboration platform that allows you to reach across your entire organization — and even around the globe — to unlock and optimize the strategic value of all of your "experts."

Plateau Talent Gateway can fast-track improvement by integrating formal and informal learning

Some Research shows that informal learning already accounts for over 80% of the learning that takes place within the business environment. Organizations that take greater control over this informal training — and integrate it with formal learning content and systems — stand to gain a valuable edge in a world where agility and shorter cycle times count, and jobs and the knowledge required to do them constantly evolve.

The most effective way to create a workplace led by experts is to integrate informal social networking and collaboration tools with a formal Talent Management System, including a Learning Management System (LMS) that is implemented at the enterprise level. Using the LMS as a hub for all learning centralizes both access and content. It also breaks down departmental or geographic silos that can otherwise keep "in-house expertise" from flowing freely across the organization.

Defining your strategic business goals for social networking and collaboration

Plateau Talent Gateway provides easy access to social networking and collaboration tools that give employees vibrant new ways to connect with each other; gain direct access to company and industry information; and a dynamic environment that lets them interact with and contribute to content. Plateau Talent Gateway can provide a portal to resources that can include internal search engines, blogs, document libraries, communities, and wikis where employees can build institutional knowledge about anything from products and FAQs to real-world tips on carrying out standard operating procedures.

Through Plateau Talent Gateway, organizations can offer access to:

• Experiential learning and exposure to other departments and roles
• Best practices, internal standards and documented processes
• References, reading materials and information repositories
• Internal subject matter experts
• Mentors and interaction with peers, project teams, common interest groups, informal professional networks
• External resources, including relationships with outside professionals, customers, and association members

Addressing "social media" implementation, security and flexibility

The ROI on social networking and collaboration technology can be substantial. As with any technology initiative, however, it's important to remember that technology itself it just an enabler. Seeing results means backing that technology with a well-thought-out plan that considers the company culture, business objectives, implementation, and challenges. These three critical issues below should be addressed by every plan for bringing Web 2.0 tools to the workplace:

1. Implementation. As noted earlier, results are optimized when social networking and collaboration are integrated with an enterprise-level talent management program and LMS. The ideal solution is a portal that offers seamless access to (and navigation of) these Web 2.0 tools and a seamless, direct connection to the full talent management system so that your Web 2.0 tools can contribute to learning, performance, competencies, compensation management, succession planning, and development.
2. Security. To engage employees and meet strategic business goals, it's critical that your Web 2.0 tools be completely configurable so that you can make the decision about which tools you will make available to which users. This creates a secure, controlled environment in which you are free to experiment and fine tune what types of social networking, search, and collaboration work best for you.
3. Flexibility. The architecture for your Web 2.0 workplace should be completely scalable for both internal and external audiences. In addition, the ideal portal does more than bridge the talent in your organization, it fully leverages it. In other words, the system not only connects existing pockets of talent (e.g., inside product management, engineering, sales, customer service, etc.), it puts all those resources into a common framework so that greater value can be realized from those existing resources.

Plateau Talent Gateway — ththe proven pathth to a successful Web 2.0 workplace

With budgets so tight today, there is little margin for experimenting with what portal solutions work and which don't. Nor can organizations afford to spend months developing custom systems to facilitate knowledge sharing, collaboration and informal learning activities. And no organization wants to run the risk that a great technology solution will ultimately fail because the company providing that solution doesn't have the support services — or the financial strength — to be a long-term partner. These reasons are why so many organizations seeking the rewards of a Web 2.0 workplace are choosing the Plateau Talent Gateway.

Plateau Talent Gateway provides a portal that gives employees access to the most advanced social networking and collaboration technology available today. Unlike other systems, the Talent Gateway offers easy-to-use content management plus scalable user management functionality. In addition, it offers the flexibility to bridge and better leverage existing content, a capability noted earlier as critical to the success of any Web 2.0 workplace initiative.

Real-world praise for ththe value of social networking and collaboration

One Plateau client — the Director of Learning Services for the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) — says that "by blending social communication with marketing communication and competency-based learning content, we are filling a critical need for libraries worldwide. With the unbelievable stress on library and education budgets, our members can't always go to conferences. Now we're able to fill that gap because Plateau allows them to participate in a community and benefit from one-to-one interaction with peers and experts."

Please contact us for more information about the business value of a social workplace and Plateau Talent Gateway or visit us at http://www.plateau.com/.

About Plateau

Plateau Systems is the industry's premier provider of enterprise-class SaaS talent management suites. Major global corporations and government agencies, including General Electric, the U.S. Air Force and Capital One Services are using Plateau's integrated talent management solutions to improve productivity and facilitate strategic workforce initiatives around learning, performance, compensation and career and succession management. Plateau is widely recognized throughout the industry for its commitment to customer satisfaction, forward-thinking vision and for consistently delivering best-in-class functionality. Founded in 1996, Plateau is headquartered in Arlington, Va. and has offices across the United States, Europe and Asia Pacific. For more information about Plateau, visit http://www.plateau.com/.