Cemex wins social networking award

Cemex been chosen for the 2010 Forrester Groundswell Awards as a winner in the “Management: Collaboration System” category. The category recognizes major social networking initiatives such as the company’s Shift platform.

Shift is a new collaboration platform for Cemex employees worldwide, combining elements of popular social networks, wikis, and communications tools to encourage efficient and meaningful company-wide sharing of innovative ideas and best practices.

“This award is a great honor,” said Lorenzo H. Zambrano, Cemex chairman and CEO, in a written statement. “With Shift, we continue to empower our employees by promoting engagement and collaboration beyond traditional roles and titles, allowing the best ideas to resonate company-wide and effect real change. We are thrilled that Cemex’s Shift is being recognized as a worldwide leader in employee collaboration after its deployment less than one year ago.”

The platform launched in January 2010, and now more than 17,500 CEMEX employees worldwide are active participants. Since its launch more than 500 virtual communities transcending typical corporate structures, departments, and titles, have been created by users. Topics range from best practices in environmental stewardship to streamlining supply chains to sharing sales successes. In the “Value Propositions” community, for example, 239 employee ideas have been posted and 118 are in the process of adoption across the company.

This fourth annual Forrester Groundswell Awards recognize Cemex for the Shift platform’s use of social media applications toward achieving genuine employee collaboration, and were announced last week at the Forrester Consumer Forum in Chicago. This year there were more than 130 entries to the Forrester Groundswell Awards in four divisions including Business-to-Business (B2B), Business-to-Consumer (B2C), Management, and International. More information about the Forrester Groundswell Awards is available at https://www.forrester.com/empowered.