Untangling the Potential of Web 2.0

Booz Allen experts weigh in on the promise—and peril—of the swarm of new social media technologies.

Blogs, Wikis, YouTube, widgets, podcasts, virtual worlds… These are only a few of the tools that define social media, a.k.a. Web 2.0—the latest participatory wave of the Internet.

Social media is a collection of technologies characterized by rich user experiences, dynamic content, scalability, and easy access to collective global intelligence, by way of user participation, links, and digital identities.

At Booz Allen Hamilton, principal Dennis Murphy is providing clients with social media services that go far beyond technology and communications. He and his team offer the full lifecycle of tools and guidance on how to use them, and their solutions help clients make smart decisions today that will also pay off down the road.

“Social media enables transparency and dialogue with organizations,” Murphy says. “Information that can be accessed by multiple geographies, stakeholders, and users encourages greater understanding, sector collaboration, and adoption of policies.”

Murphy’s colleague, principal David Sulek, puts it this way: “Social media technologies enable instantaneous peering and mass collaboration in a way that transcends traditional communications and commentary. They offer venues for new forms of innovation and create new social connections across an organization.”

But, at the same time, there is another view of social media that users should address—one that Sulek calls “a double-edged sword.”

“Social media is a two-sided coin of promise and risk,” he says. “On the side of promise, it can enable unprecedented collaboration, smash silos, unleash innovation, and enrich our communications. The lightning pace of social media development, however, is challenging our ability to grasp its enduring implications.

“We can’t yet realize the full extent of the changes it could make to the political, technological, economic, and cultural fabric of our society,” Sulek adds. “We’ve already seen that without proper controls, these technologies create new opportunities for slander, defamation, false accusations, and stalking.”

How do organizations embrace the promise of social media while guarding against the hazards? Sulek’s questions and Murphy’s answers ensure that Booz Allen considers all sides of the issue, while providing clients with the expert guidance they need through a decision-making process that is steadily growing in complexity.

A Technical Framework with Broad Applications

At its core, social media is a technical framework. Its value comes from how it’s used—“how well it identifies what the user needs, and how well it creates a technical structure around those needs,” says Murphy. From strategy to technical development and implementation, the firm brings first-hand experience to social media applications.

Internally, the firm has connected its geographically dispersed staff with an integrated suite of enterprise-wide applications called hello.bah.com. Allowed to grow from the bottom up, hello.bah.com has offered staff the ability to provide input into its development from the beginning. Before its official firm-wide launch in summer 2008, 25% of the staff had already created user profile pages.

Externally, Booz Allen has designed and implemented enterprise-wide social networking capabilities at public and private institutions and in the defense and intelligence communities to improve knowledge management, communications, and collaboration and foster virtual communities.

This expertise is especially critical in the federal agencies that comprise many of Booz Allen’s clients. Agencies need more horizontal collaboration so they can integrate their missions more closely. Social media technologies can be powerful enablers in this effort, and can link disjointed communities and provide digital identities.

“This connectedness is often interpreted as a technological breakthrough,” Sulek says. “But it’s really merging technology with changing patterns of human interaction. Social media can be oversimplified as a technological silver bullet to stress benefits, but without a commensurate discussion of risks.”

Sulek has identified key political tensions created by the explosion of social media use: “For example, the U.S. government is using social media sites like Intellipedia to combat terrorism by enabling analysts to more seamlessly share information and piece together composites of terrorist threats. At the same time, however, social media tools may allow those same terrorists to aggressively use the Internet for radicalization and recruitment.”

All organizations should ask themselves five critical questions before implementing social media solutions, says Sulek:

• Do the solutions align with the organization’s cultural norms for collaborating and communicating, or are they a radical departure?
• What types of information should be shared, with whom, and for what purpose?
• What incentives and disincentives will be created around the new applications, and will you be out of the loop if you don’t use them?
• Who will manage the content created via these solutions?
• What risks are associated with more open and transparent communications?

When it comes to social media, Murphy and Sulek agree that technicians and policy experts often ignore the value of each other’s perspective. But at this historic juncture of technology and culture, users and organizations must make policy choices they didn’t need to make before.

As “Web 2.0” morphs into “Web 3.0” and beyond, Sulek and Murphy’s ongoing exploration into the pros and cons of social media are providing the insight that Booz Allen needs to help clients weigh their crucial—and sometimes controversial—new options.

Aligning Social Media Strategies with Organizational Cultures

“An effective social media strategy does not stand on its own,” Murphy says, so the firm leverages its staff of skilled IT developers, organizational change experts, and communications professionals to build solutions that are aligned with the ongoing practices, culture, and environment of the client organization, not at cross-purposes to them. They also ensure the solution considers how well the client staff will adapt to new technologies, which can vary wildly between generations.

The team creates governance strategies to address other hurdles by filtering out irrelevant material; rewarding individuals for good ideas; outlining how ideas are adapted at an organization; or establishing rules for codes of conduct. The firm can also monitor social media applications for content accuracy and appropriateness and to ensure participants comply with governance standards. They also train clients to manage their own content.

“Successful use of social media requires knowledge beyond IT requirements,” says associate Steve Radick, who co-leads Booz Allen’s social media change management and user adoption efforts. “We must first understand the environment in which the tools will be used and weigh the ability of the users to adapt to using these tools.”

One successful Booz Allen social media solution involves improving the effectiveness at a large federal security agency. Similar to a blog, the solution allows anyone in the agency to vet his/her idea directly to management, a process that had formerly been closed. When the agency suffered a computer breach and offered staff a half-day of counseling on ID protection, staff from around the country used the application to weigh in with other options that took less time but accomplished the same objective.

“Participants modified the original idea, support crystallized around it, and management ultimately chose one of the participant’s ideas,” says Murphy.

Although the application already enjoys a high level of adoption by agency staff, the firm is now assessing how to reach the portion of the agency workforce who have not yet logged on.  On this topic, Murphy and Sulek are aligned. “Implementers must understand the level of disagreement at an organization as well as the level of acceptance to build a successful strategy,” Murphy says.

But the primary challenge of social media is understanding the downstream implications, says Sulek. “We need to take a judicious look at the expected outcome and ensure it’s aligned with what the client wants to achieve before we build a solution around it. People are already using social media in ways we never predicted. It’s more than a shift in technology—it’s a powerful, growing social phenomenon. We must explore how it may fundamentally change cultures, organizations, and human relationships before we apply it indiscriminately.

“Leaders may want to adopt the latest technologies to keep pace and retain younger employees,” he adds. “But they may seriously underestimate the power ‘flattening’ will unleash, and more importantly, their inability to manage the information produced in these collaborative environments. I’m a fan of social media, but I predict in three years, business journals will be filled with social media horror stories from organizations that jumped on the bandwagon without fully comprehending where it was going.”

Murphy acknowledges the potential unknowns, but believes social media is here to stay. “There will always be a place for traditional media such as newsletters, but as clients become desensitized to corporate communications and more comfortable with emerging technologies, many organizations will need to supplement their traditional methods. This new culture of socialization is not going away. To apply it successfully, we must use all relevant expertise available at Booz Allen to customize the right solution.”

story posted September 17, 2008