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.

In addition to supporting individual exchanges, micro-blogging can become the vehicle for virtual group discussions. For example, Booz Allen has held several forums through micro-blogging. In this case senior executives make themselves available for questions at an agreed upon time. Employees can follow the discussion thread and make contributions.  This provides a new sense of connection, as well as updates on where the firm is going which is especially valuable for a global organization of 23,000 people operating in almost every time zone. Even if people cannot participate, these forums are archived and accessible at any time.  We have seen these group dialogues on Twitter. Moving them inside the trusted environment of the enterprise can further open up the conversation.

Walton related another use case as micro-blogging can serve as an ambient alert system that tracks events within the enterprise.  There was an issue around a new smart phone roll out.  The IT people responsible for this began to see concerns on the micro-blogging system long before the volume of help tickets rose to alert status.  They were able to quickly address the issue through the micro-blogging system and other channels, indicate they were aware of it, and add that a fix was on its way. The speed of detection that micro-blogging offered turned what could have been a black eye for the IT people into an example of proactive responsiveness.

Walton sees micro-blogging as a means to stay in touch with the pulse of the enterprise. This can be oversight of a tactical issue like the smart phone effort or more strategic topics such as what are people hearing from clients in the field or what are the main concerns of employees. Many of the enterprise micro-blogging tools have recognized this potential and have implemented metrics and dashboards to aggregate messages for more comprehensive monitoring.

The system recently received another award, this time from CIO Magazine. The award citation noted that "Booz Allen Hamilton wanted a "deliberately fun" way to increase collaboration among its 23,000 worldwide staffers, especially those who might feel isolated while working at client sites. Its solution: Hello, a suite of tools including blogs, forums and wikis that make it easier for employees to find staff with specific expertise, and to mine and enlarge the consultancy's knowledge base. The system serves the company's goal of finding ways its employees can "work together differently" and has also added to the bottom line: While Booz Allen doesn't sell Hello, it has leveraged its experience with the system to develop customized Enterprise 2.0 solutions for clients."

I continue to be impressed with what Booz Allen is doing in the enterprise 2.0 space and enjoyed Walton's presentation at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston.