The Growing Popularity of Social Networking and Expertise Location
Social networking refers to systems that allow members of a specific site to learn about other members' skills, talents, knowledge, or preferences, regardless of geographic location. Popular examples include MySpace and Facebook, and professional examples include Ryze and LinkedIn.
In the business world, awareness and acceptance of social networking increased in 2005 when The News Corporation bought the parent company of MySpace. This trend has continued with recent transactions, such as Microsoft's purchase of a small share in the social networking Web site Facebook.
Inside organizations, social networking tools are often used to enhance communication among employees. Staff members leverage social networking applications to learn more about each other, including background information such as job histories and personal interests. When employees have access to this kind of detailed data, conversations become more valuable. Some organizations also employ social networking to help identify experts in specific topic areas.
Users find that the ability to invite others into their own personal networks is an appealing feature of social networking, especially since having more direct connections is often viewed as a status symbol. Many participants describe their networks as "communities," signaling the extent to which personal relationships and trust are engendered through these types of interactions.
Due to the recent explosion of interest in this topic, APQC is embarking on a consortium benchmarking study to uncover best practices related to social networking and expertise location. The goal of this research is to help answer questions such as:
- How can organizations successfully identify experts and those with the necessary experience to staff projects or programs?
- What is an effective way to expand and manage networks of experts?
- Do organizations need formal expertise location processes and systems? What about existing communities of practice and networks?
- How do organizations differentiate between expertise and advice?
- How can organizations make it easier for highly skilled specialists without much flexible time in their schedules to collaborate?
Click here to learn more and find out how you can get involved.
When to Use Social Networking for Expertise Location
In many organizations, there is a significant convergence of social networking and expertise location. Expertise locator systems (ELS) are designed to:
- connect people to people,
- link people to information about people,
- identify people with expertise and link them to those with questions or problems,
- identify potential staff for projects requiring specific expertise,
- assist in career development, and
- provide support for teams and communities of practice.
Some organizations use the same internal social networking site, intranet, or portal for internal expertise location as they do for communication and general networking. Many consider expertise location to be an extension of knowledge management, in that the goal is to capture and reuse the skills and experience of internal staff members in order to increase competitive advantage.
Implementation Guidelines
To ensure that the system aligns with business needs, Kumar recommends that organizations spend a significant amount of time analyzing goals and objectives during the planning process. Kumar is also a proponent of phased deployment, in which the expertise location system is introduced to one department at a time.
(You can find more on Anil Kumar's remarks and advice in "The Logic Of Expertise Location: Tap Into Employees' Backgrounds and Experience To Gain Competitive Advantage" by Will Kelly.)
Benefits
The principle reasons why organizations are attracted to social networking tools are because they are user-driven, easy to use, and can be implemented and maintained at a minimal cost.
From an employee perspective, social networking offers the ability to identify and consult with experts in order to solve problems and find answers to questions. Social networking tools are usually the fastest, easiest way to locate individuals with specific skills or expertise. Users may search generally or by certain topics to find experts; search criteria are often flexible and customized. Although many professionals maintain networks of external contacts, most organizations would like to encourage employees to seek help and expertise internally before reaching out to people outside the enterprise. Often, employees search their external networks only to learn later that there were internal experts in close proximity.
Consider this example of social networking in action: An employee uses his organization's intranet to establish a social network by adding other employees he knows and has worked with on various projects. While working on a new project, this employee can send a question to his network via the social networking site. If a member of the network knows the answer, that individual can respond directly; if not, the individual may forward the query to another network. Whenever the answer is sent, it will be saved in the system for future retrieval.
Issues and Risks
Although social networking tools provide numerous benefits, there are some issues that impact effectiveness. For example, time is always a barrier to knowledge sharing and contribution, even with social networking. How do organizations convince employees to take the time to create and update profiles? What prevents employees from simply directing questions to colleagues they already know, rather than searching through profiles for someone with the requisite knowledge? Does the time investment outweigh the benefits of using internal expertise location systems? These questions must be addressed, and the value of social networking should be clearly articulated across the enterprise.
Another issue is consistency. Are all employees using the internal expertise location system, or are they turning to external sites such as LinkedIn for information? Some organizations indicate that employees prefer external sites to internal portals and intranets. Often, this is because external sites offer more freedom in terms of the type of information that can be posted, which makes them more flexible and attractive tools. For example, many organizations restrict employees from posting photographs, family information, and other personal data internally. External sites have no such restrictions and enable users to customize profiles using whatever methods they choose.
Security is always a concern when it comes to any type of social networking. Specifically, many organizations worry that employees will accidentally share proprietary information while using social networking tools. However, according to Gary Matuszak--global chair of KPMG's information, communications, and entertainment practice--the significant risk in social networking is not that users will share too much information, but that they will share too little. In order to succeed, social networking systems require a large number of active participants who are willing to ask questions and share their knowledge with others.
Case Examples from Leading Organizations
Below are brief descriptions of how three best-practice organizations are harnessing the power of social networking to facilitate expertise location. You can learn more about these organizations and their use of
Accenture
Accenture provides consulting, technology, and outsourcing services to clients around the globe, including approximately 90 percent of the world's top organizations. Outsourcing, via data networks and online applications, accounts for a large portion of the firm's worldwide activities, which are supported by 160,000 professionals in 46 countries.
Accenture People, soft-launched in April 2007, is the primary application used to identify and locate people across the organization. This tool enables each employee manage his or her own "My Page," which is a personal workspace editable only by that employee. My Page is intended to serve as the primary place to create role-based portal pages.
Accenture People profiles provide contact information such as e-mail addresses, telephone numbers, and locations. Also included on the profiles are brief descriptions of individuals' roles and responsibilities, educational background, prior work experience, and current projects. Reporting relationships are listed so that others can see who each individual reports to as well as who reports to him or her. This type of information enables people to identify working relationships they may have in common across the organization.
Each profile also includes a picture. Many find that this simple gesture helps facilitate more personalized connections, and employees often look up profiles in order to put faces to the people they talk to regularly. Individuals may choose to designate themselves as experts in industries or service areas and to indicate such expertise on their profiles.
Hewlett-Packard
California-based Hewlett-Packard (HP) is among the world's largest IT companies, offering a wide range of products and services spanning the printing, personal computing, software, consulting, and IT infrastructure businesses. HP operates in more than 170 countries and supports a global work force of 172,000.
HP uses an internally developed application called me@hp as its primary social networking tool. Representatives from HP's KM team compare this application to external sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn. There are currently 1,000 users of this opt-in application, and that number continues to increase. The organization notes that allowing people to personalize pages with profile pictures and areas of interest has increased adoption, in part because the existing company directory does not include such capabilities.
To facilitate expertise location, the KM team relies primarily on specialty discussion forums, rather than other, more formal expertise location tools. HP does have an expertise location system on its intranet, but this is more often used by resource managers to staff engagements.
Royal Dutch Shell
Royal Dutch Shell comprises a global group of energy and petrochemical companies active in more than 130 countries and territories and employing approximately 108,000 people worldwide, excluding contractors. In addition to producing energy resources and creating fuels and petrochemicals, Shell has a large portfolio of hydrogen, biofuel, wind, and solar power initiatives. The organization also serves as a consultant and provides research and development expertise in the energy industry.
For expertise location, Shell relies on its global networks (i.e., communities of practice). The organization's CoP program encompasses more than 22,000 members across 13 global networks.
Web-based discussion groups, hosted on SiteScape, allow network members to ask questions in high-traffic areas and receive responses within 24 hours. Every time a question is posted, an e-mail notification is sent to the members of that community. If community members are logged into e-mail at that time, they can immediately enter the community--no additional sign-in is required.
Shell notes that, with