Description:
The University System of Georgia’s (USG) central organization for technology-based services, the office of Information Technology Services (ITS), works to ensure that technology enables the USG to deliver vital academic support, business services and information securely to more than 315,000 USG students and 42,000 educators and administrators. To help bring these disparate constituencies together to enable better collaboration, communication and information sharing, ITS selected Enterprise Hive social business software to deploy a robust set of private, secure online communities, called GeorgiaBEST. With close support from Enterprise Hive, ITS designed its online communities to enable students, faculty and staff across the USG to find and connect easily with each other and to empower them to seamlessly communicate, collaborate and share knowledge, information and resources.
Challenge:
Information Technology Services (ITS) is the University System of Georgia’s (USG) central organization for technology-based services. ITS’s primary objective is to ensure that technology empowers the USG to deliver vital academic support, business services and information securely to approximately 315,000 USG students, 42,000 educators and administrators and 9,350,000 Georgia residents.
Saving time and resources to help institutional users stay current with projects that affect each of the USG’s 34 campuses was a major objective in launching its new overall community, called GeorgiaBEST, using cloud-based social business software, HiveSocial by Enterprise Hive. One important goal for the communities was to move away from LISTSERVs to reduce costs and provide easier, secure access to information and people in the community.
Action:
Utilizing best practices, pre-configured templates and knowledgeable project managers at Enterprise Hive, the GeorgiaBEST collaborative community was activated within a few short weeks. Enterprise Hive provides hands-on, personalized training for each community, which assisted the moderator of the GeorgiaBEST community to quickly learn to use the administrative features of HiveSocial.
Result:
Allocating one to two hours per week on site administration, GeorgiaBEST maintains a vibrant and active community for members with varying degrees of experience and interests ranging from technical to specific application areas.
Today, GeorgiaBEST relies on the HiveSocial platform to provide their members with private communities of practice that require minimal site administration. Their HiveSocial communities enable individuals to easily become members of GeorgiaBest and connect with members on other campuses, share best practices, find documents, locate newsletters and get the information and updates on their implementation project all in one place.
