Comments on: User-generated content for employee directories

By: Andrew Fix

Andrew Fix — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 09:28:40 +0000

If we can encourage users to populate themselves, it will encourage others and we can build critical mass. We are heading down this rout, but a few words of warning from our experiences;
- Beware staff councils and lawyers, be proactive in this area,
- Gradually rollout functionality rather than big bang,
- Social networking in the enterprise is about a 50/50 love hate split,
- Be prepared for comments like,
“Get facebook out of the enterprise, it’s for my kids”
“Why do I need to network, my colleagues sit in the same office”
Some people will never get it…

By: Patrick Sikes

Patrick Sikes — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 22:52:04 +0000

Our first step was to allow employee’s to share some information about themselves, however we did it more structured by giving them 20 questions (10 about “my work” and 10 about “my life”). This was completely optional however we had a huge response from both people filling out the “bio” and employee’s who found it really useful in their daily interactions.
A few months later, we add two additional fields, one is a open “What’s your experience” more of like a mini resume and the other box is a skills tag or label list. The skill labels allow us to group employees together and make it easier for project managers to find the right members for their new teams.
The latest piece we implemented is around rewards & recognition. We added a tab to our people finder page that allows employees to write short (public or private) “kudos” to each other. They are allowed to send 10 per month to try to keep them real and not too frequent or frivolous.
Let me know if you have any questions on our implementation.

By: Merlin Francis

Merlin Francis — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 09:17:06 +0000

Hi! I came across this newly launched application from Twiki, which overcomes many of the issues related to Enterprise collaboration raised in this article. To know more you can probably check out the following link http://twiki.net/twikiconnect.html.

By: Mike Riversdale

Mike Riversdale — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 02:56:05 +0000

Gosh, how serendipitous, I’ve just written about the very same subject – Are You Being Google-Clever About Information Relevancy?
In summary:
Do you have the technical and business competence to do be Google-clever and forgo the obvious and flawed response of one-off “asking the people to supply”. Are you up for being Google-clever and giving your staff useful tools that also collect metrics? I know of no “enterprise” system that comes close to doing this – do you?