The Whitewater team was formed to make work better for IBMers via modern tools and ways of working.

In a nutshell

While on the Whitewater team in 2017, I played a significant role in making Slack available to all IBMers. We launched the Slack Enterprise Grid product on January 31, 2017 and saw adoption grow from 0 to 170K users (100K active) within the year. I worked with senior leaders in 15 business units and 3 communities of practice to smoothly onboard their business units to Slack Enterprise Grid.

Problem statement

When Slack first launched in 2013, it was readily adopted by small teams, but was expensive and difficult for a company of IBM’s size to adopt. In lieu of an official option to use Slack, teams at IBM used a free version or paid for Slack on their own, which posed a huge security risk. There was initially no enterprise offering available, so the Whitewater team set out to work with Slack Corp to make the tool safe for IBMers to use.

Desired outcomes

• Influence the design of an enterprise offering for Slack that would be safe for IBMers to use
• Migrate existing Slack teams to the enterprise instance
• Advocate for business units at IBM to adopt Slack
• Teach best practices for teams that adopt Slack

My contributions

• Communication strategy, copywriting, and overseeing communications for the launch
• Establishing & maintaining relationships with senior leaders in significant business units across IBM as we onboarded their employees to Slack Enterprise Grid
• Updates to the Whitewater website (now deprecated), including the creation of several Slack training guides
• Designing and user testing the Slack Workspace Directory
• Developing a safe, smooth migration experience for teams on Slack Plus to move over to Slack Enterprise Grid
• Helping develop an “everyone does support” process for our team, in order to quickly address user questions & problems and improve the experience of getting support
• Close partnership & collaboration with the vendor (Slack Corp)

Solution

The IBM Whitewater team spent over a year working closely with Slack to understand and resolve these issues, all of which were addressed in Slack’s latest offering: Slack Enterprise Grid. This product was launched publicly on January 31, 2017. At that time, IBM had already begun rolling out Slack Enterprise Grid to all existing Slack Plus teams at IBM.

The Slack Enterprise offering is safe for IBM teams to adopt and use internally, as well as for collaboration with invited external guests.

We announced the launch of Slack Enterprise Grid at IBM on January 31, 2017 with a blog post from the IBM CIO.

Where the project is now

The Whitewater team was reorganized and renamed Toolbox@IBM. The team’s goal is still to bring the best in class tools that enable IBMers to transform and accelerate into new ways of working. More than 250,000 IBMers use Slack for their daily work.