by Bill Ives
December 8, 2009 at 3:00 pm
· Filed under Event Announcements
This is the first in a six part series on Booz Allen’s award winning implementation of Enterprise 2.0. In June 2009, Booz Allen was honored with the Open Enterprise 2009 Innovation Award so it is a good example to explore in depth. The award honors work done to embrace collaborative and transformative enterprise 2.0 tools. In this first post we will look at the business drivers that led to this implementation and overview its major components. In future posts we will look at the change management efforts, the operational and financial impact, the lessons learned, and plans for enhancements. Walton Smith, Program Manager for Booz Allen’s information sharing efforts and the lead for the Government 2.0 client practice, has agreed to be interviewed for this series and his time is appreciated.
Walton said that in 2007 a perfect storm of events converged to prompt the creation of Hello.bah.com (Hello) as Booz Allen’s enterprise 2.0 knowledge sharing program. Like most consulting firms, Booz Allen’s strength lies in its people and intellectual capital thus Hello was designed to feature and foster these two strengths. The firm had grown in recent years to 18,000 staff and there were plans, now realized, to grow the firm to around 23,000 staff. A 2007 staff survey found that while people still felt affinity to the firm, the strength of this affinity was slipping for the first time. More than 55% of professional staff were located at client sites and some felt closer to their clients. These results concerned senior leadership and they wanted to take action to strengthen the sense of community and connection within the firm.
To meet these challenges, Booz Allen developed and implemented Hello, a suite of web-based enterprise tools designed to strengthen collaboration, connectivity, and communication across geographical and cultural barriers. It was created from vision to launch in under 6 months leveraging a blend of Open Source, COTS, and custom-developed products. Since August 2008, more than 80% of the firm has logged into Hello and more than 53% of the firm has contributed original content. There are more than 4,000 individual searches a day.
Walton said they began with the Profiles function, as they wanted the system to be people-centric rather than document-centric. To support this goal, they also made it easy for individuals to start communities. The vision was to have both the system’s organization and content co-developed by the people it serves. Walton said they wanted the organization to reflect the needs of people in the field with minimal governance versus a top-down organization chart. Any two people can start a community covering either business or social issues, and there are now 480 active communities within the system. I think this is a critical success factor. Every successful knowledge management system I have seen in the past 15 years was co-developed by the users and with enterprise 2.0 this is even more important.
When Walton received approval to start Hello he asked to recruit his staff from client serving professionals within Booz Allen. He felt that these individuals would have both the skills and the knowledge of the firm to be successful. He made sure they had a charge code to cover themselves so they could focus on the effort. He also asked for as many change management people as technical people. This is another critical success factor. I will go into more depth on the change management efforts in the second post in this series.
Hello is not a mandated system and I think this is a good move. We will see more on how it spread virally in my next post. Hello enables and encourages the broad adoption of social media tools to improve staff relationships, increase connections within the firm, enhance staff affinity for the firm, support the emergence of intellectual capital, and build client service capabilities. It is completely browser based as many client sites do allow the downloading of applications. Hello is integrated with other firm applications such as HR, security, email, and document management systems.
Hello’s technical development used an Agile process, rolling out new functionality every two weeks. The “perpetual beta” biweekly development sprints generated opportunistic and targeted features increasing Hello’s value to users and influencing adoption. There are a number of components, some created as a result of user input, and Walton gave me some background on each.
Profiles are one of the central focuses of the system. The Hello team made use of existing authoritative staff data and allowed each person to augment their Profile with a photo, short bio, and expertise or personal tags. A guiding concept was that no one would have to re-enter data already on another Booz Allen system. There are links to all content and communities that the person is connected with. You can add connections to people in a manner similar to Linked In or Twitter and tag your connection in the way you know them. In the first seven days of this feature they had over 10,000 new connections. You can sort profiles by the tags to see who has what skills, experience, and interests. This is a significant help in staffing projects and finding people for project and firm efforts.
Wikis were already in place to allow people to co-develop content. Hello integrated the standalone wiki application with the rest of the platform’s tools, including a link to profiles. This exploded the usage and helped with the viral promotion of Hello. Now wiki content became transparent to everyone. Walton gave the example of a key white paper development effort that picked up contributions outside the original team.
Blogs are used as the broadcast medium. Anyone can create a blog and anyone can subscribe to it. Again, it is linked to a person’s profile. Subscribers get email alerts on new posts with the ability to link to the post for comments. Walton was able to encourage senior Partners to start blogs. Employees appreciated the honesty with which these first time bloggers approached issues. For example, one senior partner raised an important issue through his blog and got 32 comments on the blog and many more informal references as he walked the halls. He invited the 32 commenters to lunch and together they worked through the issue. The results were placed on his blog.
Social Bookmarking provided a less time consuming way to get involved. Bookmarks on the Hello get tagged and linked to both people and communities. You can follow a tagged topic and/or a person’s bookmarks.
Forums were not part of the original plan but people wanted the ability to go deeper to a dialog over issues than the blog format provided. They also wanted to get rid of emails asking such questions as “who do you know that knows X” or “who do you know that has certain skills.” I remember getting many of these in my inbox during my days at a large consulting firm. Now these questions can be raised in a forum and people go there to find and contribute answers.
Communities provide one of the most valuable components of Hello yielding new knowledge and intellectual capital for the firm. Any one can go to a community to find all related content aggregated in one place, regardless of what format it entered Hello (blog, wiki, etc.). As I mentioned there are over 480 communities now and they act as the glue for the system.
Hello is a great resource with clear usage guidance for each tool. The definition and differentiation of each component was one of the success factors I found in the Océ enterprise 2.0 suite I reported on earlier (see Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Océ). The learning group at Booz Allen has gone a step further and requested that the proper use of Hello be included in new employee orientation and this is certainly a good move. It should significantly reduce the on-boarding time and decrease the connection curve for new employees.
In my next post I will discuss with Walton the change management efforts that have been undertaken to ensure adoption. For Twitter comment son this series please use the hashtag #bahe20. Thanks.
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Bill,
Many thanks for this post that is covering in depth one of the most exciting enterprise 2.0 initiatives out there. I’m sure this series will surface a long list of important lessons learned and best practices that could be helpful to most of the organizations approaching the socio-collaborative space. I was really feeling the need for this kind of discussion on the Hello environment.
Cannot wait to read the other pieces!
Bill,
This is a nice snapshot of the Enterprise 2.0 platform at Booz Allen Hamilton by Walton Smith (@walton3, http://twitter.com/walton3 ). Walton and his team are doing an awesome job on connecting people and surfacing collective intelligence while improving business processes. I encourage people to read the part above and soak it in, “wanted the system to be people-centric rather than document-centric”. If you put people first, the rest will follow.
I worked on the Hello Platform and must say the “data integration” is a key part of its success. We focused on data integration to save time and money by integrating existing information and systems. This integration improved the user experience by reducing user data entry. I believe nobody wants to enter the same data over and over again. Displaying related information also leads users on the path of discovery. It is important to also have system integration from the platform, important data should be in sharable formats.
I also worked with the team to create the “Colleague Connections” feature. I modeled this from “Twitter Follow”, but added support for tags. The interface was well thought out and intuitive, which lead to rapid adoption ( over 10,000 connections in 7 days ). The added tag data gave users information about how they are perceived by their colleagues. Providing a simple way for colleagues to connect gives employees an easy way build relationships on their path to discovery.
Social Bookmarking is a super simple way to support information integration. Connecting these social bookmarks (links) to people and communities is an instant way to add value. External and internal bookmarks can be added in less than 60 seconds. The use of “Linked Data” seems to be overlooked, I believe this is due to its simplistic nature. I recommend watching this TED Talk video from Tim Berners-Lee on “Linked Data”. This area of the platform could use additional work. A developer on the team has many answers for a vast improvement, I hope someone listens.
Funny how “Forums” was not part of the original plan. The forums feature is a threaded discussion board and receives the most traffic on the platform. This is a great example of why you don’t put tools before people and why measurement is important. There are many reasons why this area receives the most traffic and this comment is not the best time to go into the reasons. One comment I can share right now is, “Design for adoption”. This is the key thought for converting random users into passionate members. I can not claim all the form features as original ideas, I used an open source solution and skinned it to fit the look and feel of the platform along with some feature modifications.
Communities are a valuable part of this platform, but people are the most valuable part of this Enterprise 2.0 solution.
I am looking forward to your next part on Adoption. I am a big fan of “The 2.0 Adoption Council“. People can also get ahead of the curve by learning how to design for adoption. I recommend reviewing information from Joshua Porter, especially his book: Designing for the Social Web, he also shares information on SlideShare & YouTube. I also hope to hear about “Measurement” in the near future. My favorite person on measurement is KD Paine.
I am no longer with Booz Allen, but I am thinking forward about scalability and cloud computing.
Thanks to Bill and Walton for sharing,
Daniel Hudson
In today’s word of Amazon, Zippo etc. I can not think of any e-commerce store that could survive and build a large community of shoppers without integrating some sort of web 2.0 aspect or social media. Most of our customers stores have nowadays a forum, blog and we actively twitter.
To support this goal, they also made it easy for individuals to start communities. The vision was to have both the system’s organization and content co-developed by the people it serves. Any two people can start a community covering either business or social issues, and there are now 480 active communities within the system
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ffblogDecember 8th, 2009 at 3:57 pm |
New Post “Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part One Overview of Business Drivers and Components” http://bit.ly/8jRvL4
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Implementing E20 at Booz Allen: Pt 1 Business Drivers + Components http://bit.ly/867aES thx @walton3
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RT @ffblog Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen http://bit.ly/8jRvL4
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Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part One Overview of Business Drivers and Components: http://bit.ly/867aES Cc… @BillIves
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RT @ariegoldshlager: Implementing E 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part 1 Overview of Bus Drivers and Components: http://bit.ly/867aES Cc… @BillIves
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#SOA #Blogs Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part One Overview of Business Drivers and Com.. http://bit.ly/7MeRPX
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IM4WardDecember 8th, 2009 at 4:32 pm |
Can’t wait for the next installment RT @BillIves Implementing E20 at Booz Allen: Pt 1 Business Drivers + Components http://bit.ly/867aES -
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Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part One Overview of Business Drivers and Components #e20 http://tinyurl.com/yfzttgm
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RT @BillIves: Implementing E20 at Booz Allen: Pt 1 Business Drivers + Components http://bit.ly/867aES thx @walton3
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SEOSpyDecember 8th, 2009 at 6:00 pm |
RT @ffblog: Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part One Overview of Business Drivers and Com.. http://bit.ly/7BkwZq
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RT @ffblog: New Post “Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part One Overview of Business Drivers and Components” http://bit.ly/8jRvL4
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
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SEOSpyDecember 8th, 2009 at 7:59 pm |
RT @ffblog: Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part One Overview of Business Drivers and Com.. http://bit.ly/7BkwZq
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RT @BillIves: Implementing E20 at Booz Allen: Pt 1 Business Drivers + Components http://bit.ly/867aES thx @walton3
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Reading: Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part One Overview of Business Drivers and Components – http://bit.ly/867aES
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Luis_ALDecember 9th, 2009 at 2:31 am |
Interesting read – all pillars of E2.0 used at Booz Allen http://bit.ly/4pePim
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arimueDecember 9th, 2009 at 2:54 am |
RT @JoachimNiemeier: Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part 1 Overview of Business Drivers and Components http://bit.ly/867aES #e20
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RT @JoachimNiemeier Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen http://bit.ly/867aES people centric not document centric #e20 #web20
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Reading… Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part One – Business Drivers and Components – http://bit.ly/867aES via @JoachimNiemeier
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RT @JoachimNiemeier: Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part 1 Overview of Business Drivers and Components http://bit.ly/867aES #e20
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TheCRDecember 9th, 2009 at 8:33 am |
RT @Luis_AL Interesting read – all pillars of E2.0 used at Booz Allen http://bit.ly/4pePim [by @billives]
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Booz Allen’s award winning implementation of Enterprise 2.0 http://bit.ly/53p1aE
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Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen http://bit.ly/8jRvL4 via @PeteModi @ffblog
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Huge innovation w/LinkedIn-esk profiles RT @aponcier: Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen http://bit.ly/8jRvL4 (via @PeteModi) #in
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RT @beckyericson: Huge innovation w/LinkedIn-esk profiles RT @aponcier: Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen http://bit.ly/8jRvL4 ( …
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Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part One Overview of Business Drivers and Components – http://bit.ly/92oLTJ by @billives
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RT @dhinchcliffe: Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part One Overview of Business Drivers and Components – http://bit.ly/92oLTJ …
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RT @dhinchcliffe: Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part One Overview of Business Drivers and Components – http://bit.ly/92oLTJ …
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RT @dhinchcliffe: Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part One of Business Drivers and Components – http://bit.ly/92oLTJ by @billives
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lpin003December 9th, 2009 at 11:32 am |
@Saic_Inc @HartDanger I wish I could easily join a community at my company! http://bit.ly/7NGF8z
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Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: I have a few comments about this here http://bit.ly/5sAE3K by @billives via @dhinchcliffe #e20
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Very interesting article on implementing Enterprise 2.0 http://bit.ly/7v7z5H
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@BillIves launches 1st post in 6-part series on Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at #boozallen http://bit.ly/6XNzWm featuring @walton3 #E20
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Reading about implementing #Enterprise2.0 http://bit.ly/867aES
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pguptaDecember 9th, 2009 at 1:44 pm |
Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part One Overview of Business Drivers and Components http://bit.ly/5bz7Le
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RT @JacqueBrown @BillIves’ 1st post in 6-part series on Implementing Enterprise 2.0 @ #boozallen http://bit.ly/6XNzWm w/ @walton3 #E20
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RT @dhinchcliffe: Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part One Overview of Business Drivers and Components – http://bit.ly/92oLTJ …
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The FASTForward Blog » Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part One Overview of Business Drivers and Com.. http://bit.ly/8M5t1G
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sradickDecember 10th, 2009 at 1:05 am |
RT @dhinchcliffe: Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part One Overview of Business Drivers and Components – http://bit.ly/92oLTJ …
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Article about Implementing Enterprise 2.0 – Part One Overview of Business Drivers and Components http://bit.ly/77R1MB #enterprise2.0
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Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Pt 1 Business Drivers + Components http://bit.ly/4uo0gj Helpful post & comments 4 #e20
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RT: @webtechman: Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Pt 1 Business Drivers + Components http://bit.ly/4uo0gj #e20
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The FASTForward Blog » Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part One Overview of Business Drivers and Compon… http://bit.ly/6fUgFt
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Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by fredzimny: A sound book about Enterprise 2.0; some thoughts about Andrew McAfee’s latest book http://ping.fm/pH1Cv…;
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Social comments and analytics for this post…This post was mentioned on Twitter by fredzimny: A sound book about Enterprise 2.0; some thoughts about Andrew McAfee’s latest book http://ping.fm/pH1Cv…;
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@BillIves on Enterprise 2.0 at BAH http://bit.ly/867aES & http://bit.ly/61GkxD. #bahe20
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Hi Fred – Great review. Glad my write of this book provided some inspiration
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Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part One Overview of Business Drivers and Components http://bit.ly/52dPq5
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The FASTForward Blog : Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part One Overview of Business Drivers and Compone… http://bit.ly/5SOxIy
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joemsieDecember 17th, 2009 at 6:14 pm |
@ffblog – “Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen” http://hub.tm/FZfpq
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pboerrDecember 25th, 2009 at 3:25 am |
Recomendado: Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part One Overview of Business Drivers and Components:… http://tinyurl.com/yfzttgm
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Recomendado: Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part One Overview of Business Drivers and Components:… http://tinyurl.com/yfzttgm
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