Just because you are in a highly regulated industry doesn’t mean you can’t also be highly social. You just have to be more careful about how you do it.
At IBM Connect, TD Ameritrade and IBM shared how they made became a social business despite all the regulations and compliance issues. TD Ameritrade used IBM Connections as the basis of their social business platform, but they also integrated back end systems, gamification, and micro applications.
The first major decision was to figure out their Mobile access strategy. TDA heavily used mobile devices and needed to address security and authentication strategies for the new social platform.
A second big decision was to figure out how to implement metrics. Compliance tracking was a big question and has to be addressed early on. TDA also wanted to measure the success of the program, so figuring out which metrics were most important was a critical task.
Setting up user profiles was another major decision. Where is profile data stored, what data should appear in the profile, which should be editable and how to sync profile data are all key questions.
Some results that TDA shared:
- Launched in May 2013
- Now (January 2014) over 50% of employees engage in social on a daily basis, even though the social platform is not part of the intranet
- 1000 communities have been built and 85-90% of those are business based communities. 65% are hard business use, 25% are soft business use and 10% are non-work related.
- About to release a mobile version
TDA had to overcome lots of perceived risks to start with a social platform:
- Why disrupt our business?
- Cultural shift?
- Creating more channels? Its not about creating more channels, but creating the right channel.
- Non-business use?
- Increased managerial duties?
- More governance and compliance issues?
- Productivity Drain?
How to get beyond compliance:
- Partner with Compliance/Legal/Risk Management early on and make them an ally in the effort
- Leverage monitoring and archiving tools which helps compliance
- Create simple, practical governance that is based on your organization and includes cross departmental representatives
- Create rules of the road – don’t post illegal activity, no posts about trades, no client info, no personally identifiable information (PII) etc.
Everyone wants to know about moderation. At TDA, they do not moderate posts before they get put out. Everything is moderated by the communities after posts are available. In one year, they have only had 3 posts that had to be removed.
TDA used several tools to manage compliance and eDiscovery which helped ensure they were meeting state and federal regulations.
- Everything is using SSL to ensure messages are encrypted
- Real Time keyword flagging and notification (Actiance Vantage)
- Uses Global Relay worm device to grab all messages going through the cloud, which aids with eDiscovery
- Passive moderation is done by employees (crowd sourcing) when they see something inappropriate
