Alstom: Case Study

ABSTRACT: Alstom faced the challenge of enhancing collaboration and knowledge sharing across its global
workforce. Head of Community Networks, Walfa Chouki, used a formula of experimentation and sound
methodology to deliver an e2.0 platform to over 75,000 employees in 70 countries(*). Identifying key elements
of company culture and business requirements provided the foundation for the company’s e2.0 efforts. Alstom
has experienced benefits ranging from brand recognition to increased innovation and reduced carbon footprint.
Introduction
One in four light bulbs worldwide is powered by Alstom technologies. With 2009 sales
of €23 billion, the company is the world leader in integrated power plants for the
production of electricity and air quality control systems and the world leader in very
high speed and high speed transport, Alstom’s technological advances enabled the
company to achieve the world rail speed record at a speed of 574.8 km/h on 3 April
2007. Alstom’s employee base is spread over 70 countries and has been pieced
together through a history of mergers and acquisitions, thus silos are everywhere. So,
when Walfa Chouki of Alstom University1, was given the mission to centralize people
around the common values of Team, Trust and Action to foster knowledge sharing
across the company, she knew it would be no small task.
CASE STUDY : People and Process First. Technology Second.
People and Process First.
Technology Second.

Pilot, Experiment, Learn
At the time this project kicked off, talking
about “social networks” at Alstom was
unpopular. However, there were individual
initiatives through social networking sites
(e.g., Linkedin, Facebook). Chouki knew she
would have to experiment in order to put
together a business case she could take to
the rest of the company. During this time she
and her team used experimental pilots to
continue to understand business needs and
requirements. “We started with five pilots
using communities with different drivers and
maturity levels,” Chouki recalls.
Through the multiple pilots, Alstom’s collaborative
needs began to emerge. There was a need to
enable online communities, but what also
became apparent was the need to update
Alstom’s piecemealed, dated IT environment.
While the team was temporarily without a
formal business case, they were never
without key leadership backing. Alstom’s CFO,
CIO, SVP of HR, VP of Alstom University and
SVP of Strategy were looped in from the
beginning, regularly updated on the pilots’
progress and challenges. Chouki realized that
having executive backing early-on would
prove critical to the team’s success. “Our
strategy was to start with the believers and
with sponsors that have business challenges
where collaboration is needed.”
Alstom Puts Employees First
Before talking to vendors,
before doing a pilot, before
ever looking at technology
Chouki first wanted to
understand how Alstom employees work. Her
goal was to learn how communities could be
formed around shared interests and culture.
As Chouki looked across the company she
noticed departments like R&D, technology
and engineering could most benefit from a
collaboration platform. “We have so much
expertise and so many different products.”
The employees in these business areas could
capitalize greatly from having a combined
knowledge base.
The team continued to work with informal
networks, such as their Six Sigma organization,
to see how employees connected by interest
and separated by geography worked together.
Developing a better understanding of how
Alstom employees work and which departments
could benefit the most, the team felt
comfortable developing requirements, selecting
tools that would meet those requirements and
launching pilots.
“I think if I could
summarize it, it’s all
about people. Not
about tools.”
2
At the time this project kicked
off, talking about “social
networks” at Alstom was
unpopular.
“
”

Alstom’s Pillars of Collaboration
Armed with executive backing and a better
understanding of employee culture and
business requirements, Chouki and team put
together the Alstom Collaborative Way
program. Providing the foundation for
Alstom’s go-forward plan, the Alstom
Collaborative Way was founded on three pillars:
1) building a collaborative IT environment; 2)
people management and new ways of
working; and 3) common methodologies and
tools for communities.
Collaborative Environment (IT)
Continuing with the experimentation theme,
Alstom started down the formal tool selection
path by piloting externally hosted community
forums. Initially limited to Alstom University
employees, the pilot’s immediate success
quickly created demand from all parts of the
company. Beyond just the forums, demand
for other functionality grew as well. With the
help of Alstom’s CIO, Chouki and the team
quickly added separate wiki and blogging
applications that were available company-wide.
Chouki explains, “While successful, hosting
these tools externally was not an acceptable
long-term solution. At that time, everything
had to be internalized, hosted on our
servers.” In addition to moving the tools into
the Alstom IT environment, there was a need
to combine the tools into a single platform.
“We let people use the technology as a
sandbox, now we are moving to a completely
integrated environment.”
People Management & new ways of
working
When it came to employee education, Alstom
University already had the processes it
needed; it was a matter of adapting the
content to address tool how-to’s, as well as
community and collaboration best practices.
Alstom also created a collaboration
competency and built a series of guides on
how to run collaborative events and
meetings. “We thought that collaboration
could be seen as only virtual or by using
technology, but we wanted all meetings to be
more collaborative.” Chouki wanted to
emphasize the importance of shifting Alstom
to a mindset of collaboration. As the tools are
only a means to an
end, they wouldn’t be
utilized if the culture
remained siloed.
Common Community Framework
With employees spread all over the world,
Alstom University needed to come with a
common framework it could use to guide
community owners through community setup
and management. The goal was to have a
menu of tools and processes so anyone
looking to create a community could be
autonomous and use the menu in a self-
service manner. This was already a big
culture shift.
To complement the menu and walk community
owners through key decisions, the team
developed the Community Lifecycle and a
toolkit. “The ‘Community Lifecycle’ governs a
community from inception all the way through
shut down.” While each community would be
customized to support its individual needs,
owners still needed help evangelizing the
beneﬁt of a community, eliciting participation
and picking which tools would best meet their
requirements.
To help spread the word of what Chouki and
her team were doing, the team created an
“Introduction to Communities in Alstom”
video. The video would be played to kickoff all
large company events. Once the video piqued
“People would come to us
and say they wanted a
wiki, but they didn’t really
understand when a wiki
could benefit them”
We had almost nothing; we
started with communities, had
several technologies that were
not really integrated and now
we’re moving to a fully
integrated approach.
“
”
3
If you can imagine, we were
75,000 people at the time, and
having a common methodology
was a challenge.
“
”

Governance
Chouki knew that having a developed
governance model would help gain leadership
buy-in. “The governance helps a lot. We are
still in a culture where authority has its
importance. Governance helped us to set the
scene and build the foundation.”
At Alstom, governance was an executive
concern, but it was addressed satisfactorily
with pilot experimentation. At the same time
the team was setting the governance, they
were gathering best practices and success
stories from the pilot. One of these best
practices became mandatory: each community
must have a Community Leader, someone to
monitor and follow community life.
The Community Leader drives activity in the
community, stimulating and maintaining the
group dynamic. He or she requests resources
as needed, coordinates meetings and
deliverables, and liaises between members
and the Community Sponsor. The Sponsor is
outside the community but still supports and
promotes the community to the outside
world, and provides strategic direction and
new missions. The Sponsor provides
resources as needed and participates in the
validation of community recommendations.
And should a community become inactive,
Alstom had the foresight to build in metrics
and triggers that would prompt community
shut down. “If there is no activity within six
months, if people aren’t motivated to
participate or if the sponsor becomes
disengaged...we can make that decision
conﬁdently.”
Governance was also evident at a departmental
level where roles were clearly deﬁned. IT was
responsible for building the Alstom
collaborative environment; HR examined the
way in which Alstom recruited, developed and
rewarded collaboration; and everyone
involved was responsible for developing a
common framework for community planning,
training, development and roll out.
user interest they would contact Chouki and
she could apply the lifecycle methodology to
help the community get up and running. This
video is also available on external channels
like YouTube, Dailymotion or Slideshare
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVoDJZT-Rnw)
Similarly, the Alstom University team created
e-Learning modules for the different tools and
technologies Alstom now had. Users would
again be prompted to contact Chouki’s team
for guidance.
“We made it very clear from the beginning that our
communities should abide by three basic rules:
1) collaboration is business related;
2) collaboration should not be anonymous;
3) activities within these platforms should be monitored,
not censored.”
4

Success is more than Metrics
There are no concrete metrics that capture
Alstom’s success. However, Alstom believes
it has experienced multiple benefits from its
collaboration roll out, many of them
emergent. The first is what the company calls
the “employee lifecycle.” Alstom has seen a
boost to its brand among potential
employees. “It’s helped attract some new
candidates,” Chouki explains. The Alstom
Collaborative Way approach has received
attention at conferences. “It’s quite modern
compared to other major industrial companies
with Latin culture.”
Alstom now has a new understanding of what
it takes to be successful in its highly
federated, but collaborative culture. HR is
now looking at augmenting the skill set it
looks for in developing leaders or managers.
It’s not only about functional expertise, but
about the behaviors you want to assess,
evaluate and reward.
Collaboration has also sparked innovation at
Alstom. Ideas are being shared more readily
than before. The Innovation Management
System Community realized that they didn’t
have a community for managers. “They
gathered 100 managers facing the same
problems, and now they’re collaborating on
ways they can all help Alstom be more
innovative.” This community engaged the VP
of Strategy and is now working on developing
a new approach to improve innovation inside
Alstom.
A final area in which Alstom is seeing great
benefit, and in line with their corporate social
responsibility efforts, is a reduction in their
carbon footprint. By implementing a Cisco
Telepresence© solution, with each virtual
meeting held Alstom is measuring and
reducing its C02 emissions.
How Alstom Measures Success
Return on Investment (ROI) and Key
Performance Indicators (KPIs) get a lot of
buzz in the e2.0 world. Chouki, like many
other practitioners,
noted KPIs and ROI
metrics were difficult
to ascertain. “We
started to measure the activities through the
tools, we called it a dashboard...but frankly
the measured metrics do not reflect
collaboration, but rather activity which is
essentially meaningless.” After a few months,
Chouki directed the reporting to focus more
on Return on Experience (ROE) than ROI.
Documented interviews with successful
community managers were initially posted on
the corporate intranet; now the team
conducts and posts video testimonials.
One such successful community is the 1,000
member of their Global Field Service
Network. The community is composed of
employees all around the world who have
expertise in Alstom’s power plants. “They
created a pool of people who travel globally.
In the low activity period, they participate in the
community and by transferring knowledge.”
“We often talk about KPIs
or ROI, which are very
difficult to pinpoint.”
5
It’s not just one big issue that
we helped to solve, but it’s all
these things put together that
help to make Alstom a better
place to work.
“
”

What’s Next?
Alstom still faces challenges. There is an
element of management resistance that the
company is experiencing. “Managers want to
know that the information being shared in
these communities is accurate.” Chouki
believes that a continued focus on user
education and change management can help
show that not only is the information
accurate, but that communities are self-
regulating, weeding out the inaccurate
information.
Alstom University is by no means ﬁnished in
bringing collaboration and capabilities to
employees. The company is currently working
on rolling out an educational video sharing
platform solution (Alstom University Tube) to
enable social learning and knowledge sharing.
Alstom employees can record and share
short, but valuable educational content.
“Think about it, we have nearly 100K trainers
in the company,” Chouki exclaims.
For those about to embark on an Enterprise
2.0 initiative, Chouki has some advice. “It’s
not about the tools; it’s about their usage and
the mindset.” She warns against rolling out
tools if you don’t ﬁrst change the culture to
one of collaboration. To that end, she
suggests getting management buy-in early on
so that employees know it’s acceptable to
share knowledge through these new tools.
“You can have the best tool in the world...it
will be useless if you don’t have adopters. So
don’t think about the tool, think about how it
impacts the organization.”
You need the management to
push it, but you need the
organization as a whole to be
ready to use it.
“
”
6

7
Type Société Anonyme (Euronext: ALO)
Industry Engineering, manufacturing, technologies and transport
Founded 1928 (Alsthom)
Headquarters Levallois-Perret, France
Key People Patrick Kron (Chairman and CEO)
Products Equipment and services for power generation and transport
Revenue €19.65 billion (year-Mar 2010) [*]
Operating income €1.779 billion (year-Mar 2010) [*]
Profit €1.217 billion (year-Mar 2010) [*]
Employees 68,860 (Mar 2010)[1]
Website www.alstom.com
[*] In 2010 Alstom created a new sector grid it offers a wide range of solutions for
power transmission, with a focus on smart grids. Alstom employs 96,500 people in
more than 70 countries, and had sales of over € 23 billion* in 2009/10.
1 Mark Alstom University (AU) was launched in 2007 with a clearly defined goal: to ensure that employees have
the knowledge, skills, and tools necessary to contribute to both Alstom’s and the individual’s success. The
Community Networks function was included from the start with Chouki and her team identifying three objectives:
1) promote the learning by sharing; 2) increase cross-function collaboration; and, 3) become a reference point
for the organization’s collaborative culture.
Source: Wikipedia
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