Two years ago I told you about a visit I made to México to pitch the business value of social software and talk about the adoption of social software inside the enterprise.
That trip was for CEMEX, the world's largest building materials supplier. Not only I'm excited to hear how successful they've been, I'm also excited because they've been nominated for a Forrester Groundswell Award.
As I read their nomination for the award, I noticed a screenshot of the homepage of their internal social collaboration platform, codenamed Shift. And as I looked at the screenshot I noticed how it's all built on Lotus Connections. So what is Shift? Here's how CEMEX describes it:
The core elements of Shift as a collaboration platform are: messaging (calendaring and scheduling, and contacts), team collaboration (file synchronization, discussion forums, ideas and notes in form of a wiki, task management, full-text search, brainstorming sessions), real-time collaboration and communication (e.g., presence, instant messaging, Web conferencing, application/desktop sharing, voice, audio and video conferencing), Social Computing tools (e.g., profile status posts to see what employees are working on, networking, blogs, wikis, tags, RSS, shared bookmarks and videos).
Shift has been deployed to 20 countries worldwide and there are currently 200 communities to address challenges such as product improvement, government regulation, and even discuss strategic topics such as Low Carbon Sustainable strategy. This quote also grabbed my attention:
The implementation of Shift has reshaped the entire organization and is changing CEMEX's corporate culture towards more openness and authenticity in the way employees interact with each other.
I think they key to CEMEX's success with deploying social software inside of their enterprise is that they've made the platform a central and essential place for collaboration. It's not a silo where employees are asked to go to for certain interactions, it's where everything happens!
So congratulations to CEMEX for their nomination into Forrester's Groundswell Awards. To vote for them and learn more about their use of social tools in the enterprise, go here.
Update (10/18/10): CEMEX has created a page on their homepage to describe Shift.