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03175 Customer Solution Case Study32321523495Financial Firm Aims to Speed Delivery of New Services with In-House Social Media OverviewCountry or Region: United StatesIndustry: Financial services Customer ProfileUSAA offers a broad range of financial services to members of the U.S. military and their families. The San Antonio, Texas–based firm serves 7.4 million members and has 22,000 employees in five U.S. locations.Business SituationUSAA wanted to help employees locate information and people faster, to improve collaboration and speed the development of new capabilities.SolutionUSAA migrated its software development team’s collaboration portal to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 to test features such as personal profile pages, content tagging and rating, blogs, and wikis.BenefitsFaster delivery of servicesImproved information qualityLower development costs“With SharePoint Server 2010, everyone can be involved in creating the best services…. Helping our employees find information and one another faster leads to faster development of new products.”Michael York, IT Director, Software Development, Improvement and Support Team, USAAUSAA provides a broad range of financial services to U.S. military members and their families. The financial services provider was one of the first of its kind to use social media such as online content rating and social networking to better engage and serve members. With the goal of offering similar services to its 22,000 employees, a team in the USAA IT organization migrated its existing SharePoint portal to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 and is evaluating its new capabilities for content tagging and rating, wikis, and personal profiles. As a result, the team will be able to locate relevant content and expertise much faster. USAA plans to upgrade its nearly 2,000 SharePoint sites to SharePoint Server 2010 to extend social media capabilities to all employees. By doing so, it hopes to speed collaboration and internal service delivery, improve content quality, and reduce costs. SituationUSAA, a diversified financial services group of companies, is among the leading providers of financial planning, insurance, investments, and banking products to members of the U.S. military and their dependents. The mission of the association is to facilitate the financial security of its 7.4 million members, associates, and their families by providing a broad range of highly competitive financial products and services. Headquartered in San Antonio, Texas, USAA has five locations across the United States and employs 22,000 people.“Social networking enables us to have a more dynamic dialog with our members.”Darrin Wylie, Director, Internal Online Communications, USAAUSAA has won awards for its outstanding customer service and prides itself on being a listening, responsive organization. On its website, members are able to rate and comment on USAA products, news, and advice postings. USAA pioneered corporate social media services, with an early presence on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites. “Everything we do is for the purpose of providing better service and value to our members,” says Darrin Wylie, Director of Internal Online Communications at USAA. “Social networking enables us to have a more dynamic dialog with our members.”With the success of its member-focused social media efforts, USAA naturally wanted to offer the same services to employees. “Many of our employees use programs such as Facebook and LinkedIn at home, and they wanted the same capabilities at work,” Wylie says. USAA had implemented Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 back in 2003 to help project teams collaborate better, mostly by sharing documents, and later upgraded to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. By 2009, the company’s 6,000 knowledge workers had created nearly 3,000 SharePoint team sites that received nearly 7 million visits a day. “We had created quite robust content libraries in various areas of the firm that employees used every day. But finding information took time,” says Michael York, IT Director in the Software Development, Improvement and Support (SDIS) Team at USAA. “Employees had to know where to look, or know someone who knew. They tracked down information and knowledgeable coworkers by sending email messages to colleagues, stopping people in the hallways, sending instant messages to friends, and so forth.” Without easy, online ways to connect and find needed documents and experts, projects took longer, and information quality varied because of the inconsistent means of gathering information. USAA wanted to improve its corporate collaboration capabilities by enabling employees to tag and rate content for quality and usefulness, and open up dialogs about content. It also wanted to help employees find experts in specific disciplines by building an employee-centric portal environment similar to other social media sites, replete with blogs, wikis, and other community-building tools. In late 2009, USAA decided to improve internal collaboration, starting with the IT department, which is a linchpin in getting new USAA products and services to members. Management launched York’s group, the Software Development, Improvement and Support (SDIS) Team, and chartered it with making USAA development projects better, faster, and cheaper. Says York, “We were already best-in-class in IT, but we wanted to get solutions and higher quality products to market even faster. To do this, we would have to collaborate more effectively.” Best practices developed by SDIS would potentially be rolled out to the rest of USAA.SolutionMicrosoft SharePoint Server 2010 was on the horizon j“Our employees are comfortable with Microsoft Office programs and with SharePoint Server, so it made sense to stick with Microsoft.” Darrin Wylie, Director, Internal Online Communications, USAAust as SDIS was getting underway, and it immediately surfaced as a top technology candidate for improving collaboration. “We looked at other collaboration and social media products, both commercial and open source, but we decided to proceed with SharePoint Server 2010 for two chief reasons: its improved social media capabilities, such as content tagging, blogs, and wikis, and its smooth interoperation with Microsoft Office programs,” Wylie says. “People inside USAA are very used to working with Microsoft Office Outlook. Our employees are comfortable with Microsoft Office programs and with SharePoint Server, so it made sense to stick with Microsoft.” In early 2010, USAA deployed the beta version of SharePoint Server 2010 and migrated the SDIS Team’s existing SharePoint site to SharePoint Server 2010. The team’s site will give USAA software developers access to relevant content, announcements, information about improvement efforts, and access to commonly used links. The site migration was part of a pilot program to test the beta software’s capabilities for organizing and ranking content, as well as for creating blogs, wikis, and people profiles. The SDIS Team used the Windows PowerShell 2.0 scripting tool, built into SharePoint Server 2010, to guide the migration. “Windows PowerShell provided guidance on how to prepare the data for an optimal migration experience,” says Cassie Choute, Level 1 Software Developer and Integrator on the SDIS Team at USAA.Within two months, SDIS had migrated all of its site’s content to SharePoint Server 2010, implemented content tagging and was experimenting with blogs, wikis, and the SharePoint Server My Site feature to create individual profile pages for each SDIS employee. Flexible Content Tagging and Rating By using the improved content tagging capabilities in SharePoint Server 2010, SDIS employees can easily assign keywords for faster location of needed content. The SDIS Team will add rich metadata tags to content to describe what it is, what it contains, or what it does. Tagged content can reside in SharePoint sites or on file shares, in departmental applications, or even on the Internet. SDIS Team members can involve peers in content-tagging decisions or even have SharePoint Server automatically extract metadata from new content. “The team really liked the taxonomy and ‘folksonomy’ tagging, which enable them to better characterize content,” Wylie says. A SharePoint Server taxonomy is a centrally managed set of content tags from which content owners select predefined tags. A folksonomy is a more decentralized type of metadata tagging in which people freely add tags to content or reuse tags that others have submitted.SDIS Team members also can tag people to describe colleagues’ job descriptions, areas of expertise, reporting hierarchy, and projects that they have worked on. When the company deploys SharePoint My Sites, the people tags will lead employees to colleagues’ My Sites, opening a whole new dimension of sharing and collaboration.The team is currently using the out-of-the-box search capability built into SharePoint Server 2010, but is considering moving to Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint to gain even greater search customization for specific communities of users.Improved Linkage with Productivity ProgramsAlthough employees are not yet tagging documents from within Microsoft Office programs“We expect a huge lift in internal communications from improved collaboration.”Darrin Wylie, Director, Internal Online Communications, USAA, USAA is looking into it. Linking SharePoint Server with Microsoft Office will provide an even greater encouragement to employees to make content as useful as it can be, at the point of creation. The SDIS Team is, however, taking advantage of other linkages between SharePoint Server 2010 and Microsoft Office programs. For example, the team linked Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds on its SharePoint lists with the Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 messaging and collaboration client. This linkage makes it possible for developers to keep track of changes to multiple lists in one place. Developers also can see and update the team’s SharePoint task lists through Office Outlook; similarly, they can view multiple SharePoint calendars—even overlay them—and book new appointments to a shared SharePoint calendar from within Office Outlook.Enhanced Wikis The SDIS Team is experimenting with the rich text editor in SharePoint Server 2010 to create wikis and discussion forums. “We think wikis will be part of the social feedback experience at USAA, and users would be encouraged to subscribe, tag, and share wiki content,” says Wylie. “We envision departmental wikis in which software development, marketing, human resources, and other departments can contribute content relevant to their areas.” The My SharePoint tab in the text editor user interface makes it easy for users to join a discussion about content, or tag or bookmark a page. USAA employees can also create email alerts when a colleague of interest posts a new wiki entry, and subscribe to a site’s Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed. People ProfilesThe SharePoint Server capability that USAA is perhaps most excited about, but has not yet developed, is creating people profiles using My Sites. “Our vision is to provide every employee with a My Site page, where employees can share their experience in specific topics and create links to specific documents, RSS feeds, wikis, blogs, and other sources with other USAA employees in a secure setting,” Wylie says. “Even though much of this information already exists, there currently is no way to pull it all together into one cohesive and individually configured environment.” Florian Braun, Level 1 Software Developer and Integrator, adds, “The My Site pages will be where everything comes together. Users will be able to search for and access documents from their My Site, and then comment on those documents, tag with the ‘I like’ feature, and make other notes that others can read. Today, if I need information, I have to search through multiple SharePoint sites, other systems, and the Internet. I can bookmark information, but no one else can see those bookmarks, nor can I leave notes. With ShareP“Our ultimate goal is to create an environment of ubiquitous collaboration, a state in which collaborative behavior is just part of what people do every day without thinking about it.”Michael York, IT Director, Software Development Improvement and Support Team, USAAoint My Sites, I will be able to do all of that, and also search for subject-matter experts anywhere in the company.”BenefitsFrom its early, positive experience with SharePoint Server 2010, USAA is set to deploy the software companywide and give all employees faster access to more relevant, higher quality information and knowledgeable colleagues. This, in turn, will help speed the delivery of new services to members. USAA sees SharePoint Server as a flexible foundation on which it can economically build a full array of collaboration solutions.Faster Delivery of ServicesBy upgrading SharePoint Server, USAA will be able to quickly and cost-effectively outfit employees with the same social media capabilities that it offers to members and that employees use and enjoy at home. USAA expects these benefits to multiply when it rolls out SharePoint Server 2010 companywide. “We expect a huge lift in internal communications from improved collaboration,” adds Wylie. York continues, “With SharePoint Server 2010, everyone can be involved in creating the best services, producing documentation, and answering questions. Ultimately, helping our employees find information and one another faster leads to faster development of new products and services for members, and this makes us more competitive.”Improved Information QualityOver time, USAA expects the amount of data in its SharePoint sites to drop significantly, because older and less-useful data will be weeded out by content ranking and rating. “Instead of employees depositing all their documents in different places, we want to grow a common base of knowledge that everyone can contribute to and use,” Wylie says. “As wikis gain more contributions, they will become more powerful. With content rating, we hope we will be able to ‘sort the wheat from the chaff’ and have the most important information rise to the top.” USAA also sees the companywide implementation of SharePoint Server and its social media capabilities as key to creating and enforcing standardized collaboration processes, which will help the company to focus on building awareness, driving adoption, and measuring benefits. “Our ultimate goal is to create an environment of ubiquitous collaboration, a state in which collaborative behavior is just part of what people do every day without thinking about it,” York says.Lower Development CostsUSAA sees SharePoint Server 2010 as a powerful foundation on which it can develop a whole host of new collaboration, social media, search, and content management solutions using out-of-the-box capabilities. “We will see major savings from the ability to develop solutions using a common, familiar technology without having to introduce new software,” Wylie says. “This is a very flexible technology that we can use to build flexible solutions.”Software and ServicesMicrosoft Server Product PortfolioMicrosoft SharePoint Server 2010Microsoft OfficeMicrosoft Office Professional 2007This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.Document published June 2010For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:For more information about USAA products and services, visit the website at: Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 is the business collaboration platform for the enterprise and the Web.For more information about Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, go to:sharepoint ................
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