Employees Connect, Contribute on Enterprise 2.0 Portal
Social networking tool aids new hires—and seasoned employees—in getting more done, faster.
For almost a century, Booz Allen Hamilton’s image as a venerable corporation has endured. But when the firm combined its respected domain expertise with its agility in building dynamic solutions, it created an Enterprise 2.0 portal that’s so powerful… it’s actually cool.
Hello.bah.com lets Booz Allen’s staff blog, create wikis, and communicate with those with similar interests. Employees find information faster, contribute to professional and alumni communities, locate mentors, build their brands as subject matter experts, network with colleagues in offices across the U.S.—and have fun in the process.
Because many of the firm’s employees do not work full time from a Booz Allen office, hello.bah.com is all about connection, says associate Megan Murray. “Hello.bah.com removes geographic boundaries, which is especially important to new hires and those working on client sites. It takes connections within the firm and makes them visible, so you can find good information quickly and hit the ground running on your first day.”
The innovative portal is easy to use: It features tools with which employees are already familiar, such as blogs, podcasts, RSS, and wikis. Its homepage consists of Communities, People, Forums, Blogs, Wikis, and Bookmarks. Staff who dig deeper can aggregate their activities with topics such as Alumni, Business, Diversity, and Social Technology. There are also over 50 Technology Focus Groups (TFGs) creating communities around interests such as Wireless Communications and Emerging Technologies.
Senior associate Walton Smith says, “Hello.bah.com provides users with a way to contribute their ideas and thoughts to issues shaping the firm. An individual who joined Booz Allen two weeks ago now has the ability to make the same connections as someone who has been here for 25 years.”
“Booz Allen staff work on the same types of things every day, but in different locations,” Murray says. “We’ve always been a company of collaborators. Now hello.bah.com can connect us, add value to our jobs, and find answers to our problems, fast.”
Like, for example, when you want to compile a history of information assurance since 1918, as vice president Tom Fuhrman and his team did. “IA Center of Excellence: Milestones in the History of Information Assurance” used hello.bah.com to provide a comprehensive collaborative effort that details Booz Allen’s involvement in IA’s evolution and helps get new hires up to speed.
Or when you want to solicit staff input about how Booz Allen can improve their career experiences, as Betty Thompson and other vice presidents did when they hosted an iSpeak DiscussionFest. The event yielded 22 pages of responses from staff nationwide and provided innovative insights that guided the development of the firm’s People Strategy and continue to help Booz Allen hire and retain future leaders.
Senior associate Scott Edington says, “On hello.bah.com, you’ll find all of your co-workers who tag themselves the same way you do. You can filter those contacts by levels or teams, blogs written, comments in forums, and much more. This tool levels the playing field, no matter what level you are in the firm. Any SME can become a leader in this space.”
Hello.bah.com’s Most Important Component: People
Hello.bah.com was born in October 2007 as Walton Smith’s scrawls on a cafeteria napkin. “Our people, our intellectual capital, and our communities are all we are,” he says, “and we needed a better way to connect the three. Most large organizations’ defacto collaborative tool is e-mail, but it’s not scalable and we don’t have time to answer so many messages. Hello.bah.com provides a way to reach out directly.”
Today, 75% of Booz Allen’s employees have logged on to the tool—and more logon each day.
Online business networking sites can be valuable tools if they’re well planned, regulated, and consistently maintained. They’re especially useful in creating new resources for a targeted population. For example, senior consultant Aaron Cohen wanted to implement best practices for onboarding within IT. But when hello.bah.com was launched, he saw an opportunity to streamline the orientation process for new hires.
“I gathered resources from multiple websites and consolidated them into a wiki called Get Onboard—a one-stop shop with information new hires need,” Cohen says. “I wrote it as one person giving advice to another about job roles and initial career development.”
Although it’s not the authoritative version of Booz Allen’s corporate policies, Cohen’s wiki includes a great deal of useful information, such as descriptions of technology resources and an overview of client expectations. Because there is so much information available and it’s difficult for a new employee to find it all, a wiki is a particularly good format for this kind of resource.
Other corporations use off-the-shelf tools or buy a corporate solution, but the System Resource Center (SRC) team developed hello.bah.com from open-source software. Vice president and hello.bah.com sponsor Art Fritzson explains, “We started with open source because the most rapid innovations in social networking were emerging from that community. We’ve completely ‘rewired’ it so that all the tools are now driven from a profile that each user can personally maintain and customize.”
Hello.bah.com is updated with new functionality every two weeks and is continually evolving in response to a developmental roadmap and employee feedback and suggestions. “We seem to have struck the right balance between social dimensions and business application,” Fritzson says. “Hello is deliberately fun to use, but also incredibly useful for our business. Our staff use Hello to more rapidly build their professional networks in a way that wasn’t possible just two years ago.”
Smith agrees. “Hello.bah.com is only as good as the information we put into it, and it grows smarter every day,” he says. “It’s been integrated into the firm’s week-long onboarding training process, and this year we’re expecting to gain at least 50% of the firm as active daily users.”
Hello.bah.com allows staff to draw on Booz Allen’s resources and create a community that works for them, the firm, and its clients. Edington says, “We show users where the walls are and how to be responsible. But when it comes to social networking, we all agree: It’s the people that are the most important components. We need resources to connect us, do our jobs, and get answers faster. Hello.bah.com makes all that enjoyable, too.”
story posted May 1, 2009
