This is the third in a six part series on Booz Allen’s award winning implementation of Enterprise 2.0, termed the Hello system. In June 2009, Booz Allen was honored with the Open Enterprise 2009 Innovation Award so it is a good example to explore in depth. In this third post we will look at the operational impact. In future posts we will look at financial impact, the lessons learned, and plans for future directions. 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 and I began at the high level. Hello marked several new directions for Booz Allen. First, the technology was designed to reflect the way the firm worked. In the past many times technology has been rolled out and the firm has had to adapt to the structure of the technology.  This alignment of tools to work resonated well with me as I have seen the excitement and commitment that this approach can generate in the field. The enterprise 2.0 tools are particularly capable of aligning with work practices since they support interactions rather than transactions.  They can become the glue that brings people, content, and data together, and this is the approach that Booz Allen took.

Second, it changed the concept of who owns intellectual capital. In the past, many teams felt they owned the ideas and work they created.  Now there is a greater sense of a global firm and a realization that the more people who have access to content and the more who contribute to it, the stronger the content will be and the stronger the firm will become.  This is consistent with the concept of knowledge is power transforming into the concept that sharing knowledge is power discussed in prior posts.

Third, there is also a greater sense of individual responsibility as people are better empowered to manage their identity in the firm and their career development. The Hello tools provide both greater control and increased transparency. So the firm is now more global, and at the same time, more of a collection of empowered individuals rather than a collection of partially siloed teams. We will cover more on this in the next post on financial impact. The firm is better able to grow organically to meet market needs rather than be constrained by organization structure and boundaries.  There are fewer large formal groups in the firm since Hello’s launch and many more informal communities around areas of interest.

At a more detail level, staff now build their professional networks in Hello in a way that wasn’t possible just two years ago. Hello has helped bridge the geographic divide of staff located in more than100 US offices and client sites, building relationships and fostering collaboration across teams. Stronger staff relationships yield stronger clients solutions and lead to growth in business.

The People Profiles discussed in the first post are one driver of this change. They have transformed the staff experience from dependency on in-person introductions and multiple data entry portals, to one of discoverability and visibility firm wide.  Staff information including name, email, team, office location, managers, resume, education, certifications, languages and past clients were pulled from existing authoritative databases eliminating duplicate data entry and new password requirements.  A short biography, staffing availability, and tags for expertise, personal attributes, and hobbies encourage customization.  The People Profile includes activity feeds reflecting community memberships, blogs, wiki and forum activity, bookmarks, and other site activity.  The Colleague Connections feature provides the emergence of relevant relationships through tagging, enabling views of colleague activity, interests and reporting relationships. In addition, a recently added employee mapping feature provides a dynamic visual graphic of administrative reporting chains for any employee, as well as making visible shared Colleague Connections. More on this is the next post on financial impact.

Hello is an open platform providing a voice and visibility for any employee at any level.  This transparency provides both opportunities and risks for staff and the firm, however Booz Allen has been reassured on both content security and its staff professionalism. Integration of Hello into project staffing and new hire orientation processes reduces staff support for these processes, speeds identification of staff for client work, and increases utilization of staff and utilization of Hello.   Using Hello as a collaboration tool, employees benefit from a colleague’s experience on a project thus saving time and informing decisions.

As mentioned in the beginning of this post, the rise in importance of communities versus formal organizational structure is another key change. The Communities feature in Hello is a key driver here.  Building this feature has been central to transferring knowledge and expertise, generating new intellectual capital, and creating relationships supportive of cohesive project teams.  As discussed in the first post, the Communities feature is a custom tool, aggregating multiple sources of content including announcements, event calendar, membership list,member expertise tag cloud, linked communities, blogs, forums, wikis, and bookmarks.

I think these organization impacts reflect the spirit and goals of enterprise 2.0 and clearly demonstrate that enterprise 2.0 is much more than technology. Enterprise 2.0 is a change in the way of doing business that is supported by the technology. The Booz Allen experience does show that new technology can change the way people work as long as it is done right. Paradoxically, if the technology is aligned to the way people work, it is more likely to successfully change they way the work and gain their commitment to this change. In the next post we will look at the financial impact of these changes. For Twitter comment son this series please use the hashtag #bahe20. Thanks.