Social networking in the enterprise? Can I have a team blog – a real one please!

http://www.finextra.com/fullstory.asp?id=18284

Canada’s Scotiabank is using technology from Microsoft to introduce an internal Web 2.0 social networking platform aimed at encouraging information sharing and collaboration among its staff.

Based on Microsoft’s Office SharePoint Server 2007, the platform enables employees to share, store, organise, search and manage information using blogs and wikis. As part of the programme, the bank is creating online user profiles for staff members.

Scotiabank, which is currently piloting the system at its international division, says the technology will transform how staff share knowledge and best practices.

Commenting on the move, Robert Fournier, SVP, enterprise architecture and methodology, Scotiabank, says: “By leveraging the knowledge and experience of the Scotiabank team with a business focused social networking platform we are enabling staff to better serve customers by sharing best practices and identifying experts and skill sets regardless of geographic and organizational boundaries.”

Dan Bloch, director, financial services, Microsoft Canada, says the SharePoint system includes native support for wikis, blogs and RSS feeds as well as privacy and security mechanisms so that employees can connect and share knowledge via a customisable and security-enhanced interface.

I think this is fantastic and wonder if it might not be a great way for IT to communicate whether we’re talking about those monthly reports, or even best practice/tips etc.

For example for the Windows team you might have:

• Name of engineer
• Core skills/application experience
• Bank application knowledge
• Contact details – phone number/instant message/email

So I can quickly see, I’ve got a problem with my Citrix application which engineer has experience with Citrix or with my applicationOr in best practice:

• The recommended way of installing services in a cluster
• How to create a share in a cluster
• What’s the correct process to make changes to a production server
• What operating systems are supported
• What hardware is supported
• How do I rebuild a Windows server
• How do I tell who owns a server – link to our inventory site – http://serverinventory.mycompany.net

In terms of reporting:

• A daily update, what we as a team are up to – whos on-call and what their contact details are
• What we read on the news today, or even news feeds for Windows etc
• Our core issues – a non emotional summary -  call volumes relating to a specific platform/application or business line – linking to our help desk reports
• What outage or issues we are having – the development network failed taking out the following servers this morning the cause is – go to http://networks.mycompany.net for more information

Our bullet points statistics

• For the weekending 27th of March we had 133 incidents, 48 requests, 95% success rate in response, 85% success rate in resolution, the core calls were for this issue:
  • Server disk space low
  • Reboot server
  • Backup failure

Just think how this could transform communication and interaction or is it me thinking this?

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