Chapter 1. BUILDING A TECHNICAL COMMUNITY

Angelique Finan and Grady Bryant

The first years of the twenty-first century were a period of tremendous growth for VeriSign, a provider of Internet infrastructure services. By late 2006, the company comprised 15 business units operating out of 73 locations globally. This growth was in part the result of 47 acquisitions. VeriSign, originally focused on digital certificates, took on a variety of Internet and telecom businesses, including Internet-based payment processing, management of the .com and .net registries, international mobile phone roaming services, mobile phone payment services, management of customer premise security devices, Voice over IP (VOIP) services, SS7 signaling services, and distribution of digital content.

Forming a coherent company out of all those acquisitions was a challenge. It's a simple matter to sketch out a new org chart but much more difficult to align cultures, loyalties, goals, and operating processes, and to capture the hearts and minds of employees. Many of VeriSign's acquisitions had operated in the fast and loose startup environment and so were accustomed to autonomy. Especially for very young, very small companies, it's difficult to give up your identity to become part of a larger, more mature organization.

We at VeriSign knew that to accomplish our mission—developing, securing, and operating some of the world's most critical electronic infrastructure—we had to maintain the trust and confidence of the public. That, in turn, meant that employees needed to be well connected and engaged. Unless we made a concerted effort to develop connections among people representing acquired companies, we would be unable to leverage talent across the organization, develop standards for problem solving and for system architecture and software, formulate and adopt best practices, share new ideas and technologies across the organization, and achieve operational excellence. Also, if our employees did not come together in some sort of community, we would be unable to develop a strong brand identity, and we would risk losing our most talented employees, who might not feel they had anything at stake in the company's mission or any important relationships within the organization.