The Business Problem

The IT department is the backbone of any organization. Not only is it charged with implementing and maintaining a company’s IT/IS strategy, often a complex or customized combination of hardware and software, the department is also responsible for supporting systems belonging to each employee in the company.

If a company’s infrastructure is running effectively, the company is operating more efficiently, which maximizes productivity and reduces costs in the long run. So a lot depends on a highly functional IT team. But how do you successfully amalgamate the breadth and width of your IT experts? How do you organize your team to deliver on your management’s IT/IS strategy, while effectively maintaining policies for passwords, audits and certification? And how do you train your end users and keep the IT department abreast of system updates?

You implement a corporate social network, that’s how.

The IGLOO Software Solution

Manage all of your IT department’s processes using an IGLOO corporate social network, including:

Use IGLOO to build a professional network and manage a highly functional IT department. Every member of your team can create and update their own professional profile, outlining specific knowledge, skills and experience related to their areas of expertise. This vital information is accessible through a private LinkedIn-like social directory–so that specialists in UNIX, Mac, mainframes, or Windows or AS/400 can be easily located, contacted and even added to an individual’s peer list. Removing segmentation between database and email experts, for example, allows for more effective cross-team collaboration.

An IT corporate social network or community can be used to store the most recent versions of all IT documentation, including wikis, install documents, password policies, configurations, and more. All information within the corporate social network can be searched, bookmarked, commented on and subscribed to (email or RSS) by any authorized person. Create bookmarks, for example, for your most mission critical documents, current projects and more. This means that your IT team members can stay on top of the latest projects and information, empowering them to do their jobs more effectively.

IGLOO delivers powerful auditing features—who updated, viewed and altered documents, ensuring accountability and security for IT documents. The Document Details feature provides a snapshot of a document’s post date, number of views, versions and size of the document. Version control gives you the ability to manage version changes of devices, for example. You can use IGLOO to maintain past and present configurations, giving you a running history of updates, including who made the update and when it happened.

Managers can monitor individual activity within the network, such as who is commenting on, contributing to and accessing documentation. Managers can also set up private areas for storing, managing and collaborating on highly sensitive materials such as passwords policies, standards, and more.

The ability to search on issues is invaluable for an IT department. Past issues and their solutions can be
documented, posted and easily accessed to solve issues current issues, allowing you to build a repository of best practices to draw from. New members of your team can use the search functionality to quickly get up to speed.
Use IGLOO to disseminate knowledge internally, within your IT department, or externally, across the entire organization:

• The team can make use of IGLOO’s Forums to post issues and collaborate on ongoing discussion threads.
  
• Integrated Calendar functionality can be used to schedule system updates, upgrading to a new anti-virus system for example, which can then be automatically broadcast to the team.
  
• These system upgrades can be broadcast to the entire organization using Blogs and Notifications.
  
• Use IGLOO to manage your IT projects like Disaster Recovery Planning and Testing. A corporate social network offers team members a centralized and secure environment where they can access everything they need—documents, calendar, blogs, wikis, forums, member profiles—to complete a project successfully. Profiles and contributions are transparent, securing trust and enabling managers to recognize contributors to keep the team motivated and the project on track.
  
• Wikis - a collection of web pages that team members access and modify - can be set up with each new project. Employees gather on them to map cell phone base stations, for example. This is especialy valuable in global organizations, where employees work remotely to contribute or brainstorm, regardless of location and time zone. All of the information captured in a wiki is securely stored in the network, preventing the loss of valuable knowledge during the project, or once it has been completed.
• IT personnel can use IGLOO to train new employees. IGLOO’s powerful content management functionality supports multiple file formats, so IT staff can upload any multimedia file type such as demos or videos, and use these to train employees across the company.