The “what” is creating an interconnected Web of relationships that fosters the sharing of ideas, uncovers expertise, and brings data out of hiding to solve problems or fuel projects.
Corporate users are taking notice, and Booz Allen Hamilton among them, because those are just the results companies coveted but couldn’t get a decade ago when knowledge was a buzz word and a project failure inside many organizations.
“Explore these [social networking] technologies because the Gen Y kids are probably right,” says Chris Howard, vice president and research directory for the Burton Group. If history is any indication, social networking could become the next instant messaging, which grew from a teen-girl chat service into a core element of corporate unified communication systems.“You have to focus on the business value and de-emphasize the cool factor,” Howard said Thursday at the annual Burton Group Catalyst Conference.
That is what is doing both externally – with Web-facing portals, virtual worlds, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn – and internally with blogs, wikis, workspaces, and social networks interconnected with content, document and records management systems.
“We want to be where everybody else is, we want to be part of the party, too,” said Jeanne Holm, chief knowledge architect at the NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
"Part of what we are looking at is what are the benefits internally [with social networking],” she said.
Those benefits now include accelerated peer-to-peer communication and problem solving, collective intelligence built by capturing knowledge from individual workers for re-use by others, and providing context to communication to help with decision making.
Holm wants to go from just one person working on a problem to perhaps thousands.
"The way people are sharing information now is through the social connections they are making and there is a lot of tacit knowledge there."
NASA’s internal social network started out with users talking about the network itself, but the chatter soon turned to questions scientists and others were seeking to answer.
They headed to the social network and Holm said the result was that 93% of the answers came from people who were in a different NASA center then the questioners, which was proof that the network was breaking down geographic barriers and unlocking potential.
Holm’s knowledge management team is now working on a project called Spacebook that combines profiling and networking together with the content used to help make decisions. It also includes a records management component.
"It was difficult to share information from one part of NASA to another, so we looked at fixing those problems," says Holm. Then they worked on integrating knowledge distributed throughout the space agency.
Holm says social networking was judged as something beneficial, useful and providing a return on investment for what NASA was trying to do.
"We think about capturing knowledge in a way that is different and near invisible." She says when people connect in an open way it can be captured and shared while still having private spaces for conversation."We want to find people's expertise and we want to capture that. In the future, we want to model that knowledge."
The knowledge will be used to support ongoing and future projects such as robotic outposts on Mars, interstellar missions and permanent space colonies.
Booz Allen Hamilton is another convert to the powers of social networking. The company’s internal social network, Hello.bah.com, is providing easy access to key data and fueling employee collaboration that has broken silos formed among 23,000 employees.
Launched 10 months ago, Hello.bah.com has gone from just over 10,000 logins per month to more than 60,000 today and from 4,000 users per month to more than 10,000.
"We were blown away by the uptake," says Walton Smith, senior associate at Booz Allen Hamilton and leader of the project. "We've discovered that the enterprise 2.0 approach is a methodology and not a technology implementation plan. We had to be agile."
Hello was up in less than six months with wikis, blogs, profiles, single sign-on and SSL VPN access all built with open source tools and some commercial software.
"We had silos of information with the same people working on the same stuff. We needed to unlock that tacit knowledge," he said.
They did by focusing on end users and giving them easy-to-use intuitive tools to add information.
"They used it not because it was a benefit to the firm but because it improved their work. And then we could aggregate that content," Smith said.
The common element was a profile and that became a foundational piece for collecting data and making connections.Key to success was targeting workers with five to 15 years of experience. Those workers had the knowledge that made the value of the system skyrocket out of the gate.
"We knew we had won when HR started to build their on-boarding class [for new employees] around Hello," said Smith. This year 5,000 new employees will begin their employment via Hello.
Smith said a change management strategy was vital to learn to work together differently and that education centered not on the tools but the concepts.
The company defined its internal social strategies, aggregated data from existing sources, listened to users, and kept departments such as legal and HR clued in.
"The Feedback Box is the most critical thing we have," says Smith. Users whose ideas are incorporated into Hello are credited on the site.
Smith says adoption was aided by building tactical strategies, tapping into existing communities and managing new communities visibly and openly, and creating examples of how work can be done.
“We are in the process of doing an ROI study, but the good news so far is that the cost is low,” say Smith.Burton’s Howard says the experience gained from NASA and Booz Allen Hamilton proves that “human interaction is part of the intellectual capital of an organization. "The anti-social organization is ultimately non-productive.”