Social Networking and Expertise Location at 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. Enterprise search indexes these pages, which allows for a full-text search on expertise.
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