Imagine a world where you can inspire your team with your leadership vision and get feedback, collaborate on a project team, build a community, share information with wide audience and express your thought and opinions, while cutting back on email traffic. Seems impossible, but SAP has been able to do that and more using SAP Jam.
We implemented Jam in 2012 with a viral adoption approach and it quickly took off organically. Now it has become the go-to space for all collaboration for our 65,000 employees globally.
What is Jam?
Jam is a social collaboration platform and so much more. All work is teamwork at SAP, and tools to simplify that are crucial. Users create groups and content based on the purpose of the community. We include everything from documents to videos (recorded directly from your webcam!) to images to wikis to polls and discussions. Groups are customized by the admin – either showing a feed of the latest activity or organized with widgets to direct users to specific content. You can even find contact information and org chart data. It’s everything you need to collaborate and be more effective in executing. And it’s mobile – on your phone and tablet. Two innovative examples of how SAP runs SAP - JAM for Leadership Programs and Regional Team Inspiration and Collaboration.
Using Jam to Develop Leaders
One of our flagship leadership programs, Leadership Excellence Acceleration Program (LEAP) uses Jam to create and sustain a community of participants who are dispersed across North America. LEAP participants have only gathered in person once, but before they did they already knew each other through Jam by sharing their backgrounds, blogging and journaling about their program experience. Program Leader Bianca McCann has used Jam to pose questions to participants, share articles of interest, not to mention using the group as a repository for core LEAP content and recordings of program call.
Bianca brings a great perspective “We’ve had great feedback from LEAP participants on using Jam to share and learn. From a program lead perspective, it’s a great way to pulse check with participants and to get a sense of what topics they are most interested in learning about and discussing together. Plus, every day members of LEAP get more and more familiar with Jam and are driving it within their teams.
Leading through Jam
How do you inspire a team of thousands dispersed across two hemispheres? Email can go unread. Webinars can have great information, but does anyone go back and reference it? Corporate Portals and Intranets have so much content sometimes it’s easy to miss some of these important messages. And these channels have limited collaboration capabilities at best.
Jam solves these problems by creating engaging spaces where leaders can communicate their vision and team members can share their ideas. Recently, Rodolpho Cardenuto, President SAP Americas, launched a Jam group for the entire Americas region with a sole purpose – to share and collaborate on the mission. The page is beautiful, there is an engaging and refreshed welcome video but more importantly there are three calls to action for group members – FIND CONTENT, POST A BLOG, WHAT’S ON YOUR MIND? It’s not just about cascading – it’s about sharing, collaborating and executing together. We’ve seen everything from pictures from our Month of Service activities to direct questions to leaders, to blogs that share examples of executing the mission.
Jam is helping us run better at every turn. We’re not just using it for traditional collaboration within and across teams – we’re using it to learn, share and build communities. Jam is bringing 65,000 people across the globe closer together.
