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07.15.10 Enterprise 2.0 Collaborative Platform By Booz Allen Extended  By Bill IvesA few months ago I wrote a series of posts on the innovative and award winning approach Booz Allen is taking to enhance enterprise collaboration and engagement (see Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: The Series). Recently, I spoke again with Walton Smith, the Program Manager for Booz Allen's information sharing efforts and the lead for the Government 2.0 client practice. Walton said that the first version of Hello, the collaboration platform, covered the exchange and archiving of tacit knowledge. Now they wanted to expand it to incorporate document management in an integrated and collaborative manner. Booz Allen selected SharePoint for the document management application as 90% of their clients used it and they already had an enterprise license. To extend the collaborative capabilities they made use of a number of third party tools including MindTouch and some other open source offerings. MindTouch was added as the wiki platform because of its ability to scale and the flexibility to rapidly develop mashups and social applications. It could also be easily integrated into the overall Hello skin. The new version of Hello includes a front end dashboard built on the iGoogle model. Users can configure it to meet their individual requirements. The third new feature is the capability to support projects. In the prior version of Hello everything was open. Now you can put in security levels to create private subsets of the conversation to support a project team. They also have added FAST for enterprise search as it provides a federated search across applications. The search results bring back related people and documents at the same time. These are all great next steps to make the collaboration platform more robust and serve a broader array of needs within the enterprise. Here is a sample screen.  We also discussed their micro-blogging efforts (which plan to be installed in the near future). Walton likes micro-blogging for circulating content because of its speed. Busy managers and consultants often do not have time to write a blog post or make a wiki entry and email is too limited. However, they can quickly push information and ideas around the firm through micro-blogging. He finds that it also levels the playing field for information exchange. Messages more quickly move up and down the organizational levels as anyone can put a message into the micro-blogging system and anyone can respond. The traditional filters of company hierarchies can be put aside, furthering the speed of communication. At the same time private groups can be easily set up for conversations within levels as needed. Continue reading this article. About the Author: Dr. Bill Ives is an independent consultant and writer who has worked with Fortune 100 companies in business uses of emerging technologies for over 20 years. For several years he led the Knowledge Management Practice for a large consulting firm.. Now he primarily helps companies with their business blogs. He is also the VP of Social Media and blogger for TVissimo, a new TV schedule search engine. Prior to consulting, Dr. Ives was a Research Associate at Harvard University exploring the effects of media on cognition. He obtained his Ph. D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Toronto. Bill can be reached at his blog: Portals and KM. He also writes for the FastForward blog and the AppGap blog. |
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